Welcome to Metagov’s Project Feature Newsletter.
For our first feature, we are excited to announce the launch of a new project called the Grant Innovation Lab. The project builds off the State of Web3 Grants Report authored by Eugene Leventhal and Mashal Waqar, the Grant Metadata Standard drafted under DAOstar, and a small convening that we hosted as part of Devconnect Week in November 2023.
Watch our video from when we announced it on December 8:
Here’s the link to the presentation deck.
The Grant Innovation Lab is meant to capture all of the related activities at Metagov and DAOstar under a single project umbrella. The vision of this effort is to help improve the understanding and tooling related to grant issuance to make it as easy as possible for those applying for grants while maximizing the impact of the work done. The mission of the effort is to conduct research, technical work, and community building to create actionable advances for grant programs.
While we are starting with a focus on granting in the Web3 world, our goal is to broaden the scope of our work to collaborate with any organization that is working on improving how grants are issued, how impact is measured, what kind of open source infrastructure needs to be in place to support these advancements, and to build the social networks needed to ensure lasting and sustainable change.
The first focus area for the Grant Innovation Lab is on research. We have applied to grants at DFINITY and ENS to support a potential V2 of the State of Web3 Grants report and we are exploring a grant to produce a State of Retroactive Funding in Web3. From there, we are interested in conducting research such as:
An assessment of Web3 Grants Tooling options
Grantee assessments within and across different ecosystems
A literature review of best practices in granting and research funding
An exploration of what a Grant Maturity Index can look like
Working with specific granting organizations to dive deeper into what impact means in their ecosystem, how to best measure it, and then conduct impact evaluations across grantees
What are best practices when it comes to conflict of interest disclosure in more decentralized granting environments
This is by no means an exhaustive list - it’s more of a starting point. Depending on who we collaborate with and what research funding is available, we hope to cover any potential research projects that can help improve how granting is conducted.
The second focus area for the Grant Innovation Lab is technical development, starting with standards. We are currently looking to get feedback on the current proposed Metadata Standard with the intention to start getting the standard applied in various ecosystems early in 2024. We see this as an important part of enabling more interoperability across grant programs. With that in place, we will be able to explore ideas such as a shared database of approved grants (ideally to integrate with Karma’s Grantee Accountability Protocol), a common app for grants, ideas for impact measurement improvement, and other ideas that emerge from the community.
We also want to explore what kind of resources can also help the ecosystem such as lists of available grants, data on grant programs (that will be added to our Govbase dataset as a new view), and other ideas that can help both potential grantees and funders navigate the space better.
The third focus area for the Grant Innovation Lab is community. This will include having a single space for grant program operators to chat, a separate space for the technical working groups, and a mix of virtual and in-person events. We are currently planning a virtual call for operators in January and a 2 day summit in Denver in late February with one day focused on grant operators and one day focused on grantees.
Calls to action
Give feedback on our proposed standard
Fill out the interest form
Reach out to me if you want to get involved (or if you’re interested in funding research/technical work or to sponsor the Summit in Denver)
- Eugene Leventhal