Gitcoin's Governance.

Gitcoin is governed by GTC, and GTC has been used to govern our Gitcoin Grants program from the early launch of the DAO. As our products and protocols evolve, we will continue to decentralize decision making and enhancements to our roadmap, Grants program, and operations of the DAO.

Products, Protocols and Technology

Gitcoin has been on a quest to decentralize our Products for nearly two years now. We have finally reached the starting line with our new decentralized Allo protocol (which is powering Grant Stack -- the dApp that enables comunities to fund what matters). This means, for the first time, someone can permissionlessly run a QF round and allocate capital democratically.

Gitcoin Passport has also found market fit in defending communities from Sybil attacks. As they expand the identity providers and support more use cases, community input is going to be critical to their success.

As part of the mid game, we want to ensure the following are possible:

1. community involvement/ratification of key protocol decisions
2. community improvements and roadmap suggestions are made
3. community feedback is given and ratified in white papers and new versions of our protocols

Grants Program

Gitcoin's Grants program has been governed by GTC token holders for two plus years. The engagement has largely been to ratify decisions being suggested by the core contributors. This includes capital to allocate (ie, much money in a grant round, which categories recveive what amount of funding, etc) as well to certify round results (ie, review sybil results and dampen accordingly before formalizing the payout details).

We have opportunity to grow involvement beyond ratification to instead encourage initial definition. This type of initial definition happens in many DeFi ecosystems. using primitives like veCRV Curve is able to create a thriving marketplace of those voting to allocate capital to pools -- and in our case -- Grant categories.

We will grow participation in Grants governance in the following ways:

1. introduce more GTC token voting methods to share sentiment on capital allocation weighting (ie, how much money goes to each matching pool)
2. reward participation through upside in net positive outcomes

DAO Operations

Running the DAO is no small feat. It takes coordination of dozens of individuals to decide what to fund, where we are focused, and how we measure progress in achieving our mission. Community memebers submit proposals in teh form of GCPs to fund work outside of "core workstreams" and workstreams submit budgets/updates quarterly to ensure they are accountable to token holders.

We have Steward calls monthly to keep our community informed, and we have an elected Steward Council that meets more frequently with the goal of offering context and guidance to the workstream leads - acting as a wise council of chieftans who share insights and help spot blindspots.

We will continue to nurture this group, and plan to ensure smooth operations of the DAO in the following ways:

1. build a DAO cadence that is transparent, predictable and actionable (ie, when are budgets coming up, when are grants rounds, when are steward council elections, etc.)
2. double down on facilitation of core interactions
3. review and revise