@lara @ld-dfn1 @Jan @chepreghy @cryptoschindler @jennifertran @radu and others on the growth team.
I’d like to make a case for DFINITY to support all applicants to this grant program. There has been a decent turnout of people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and start performing the work of validating NNS technical proposals, which is something that has been sorely lacking. This grant program is intended to be temporary, which I think is appropriate, until a long term (hopefully NNS) based solution can be defined. However, now is the time to mobilize people who are willing to perform this work. It takes time to learn how to perform these reviews and to do it reliably week after week. It takes time to build a credible reputation as a reliable known neuron that people may some day be willing to follow with their NNS neuron Followee configurations.
There is no other logical source of funding other than DFINITY / ICA to support these teams until DFINITY has time to lead the ICP community to a long term strategy that can further advance decentralization of the NNS. Supporting only 2 teams for each proposal topic is too few and I think supporting all teams is not too far from what you have already been willing to fund. Since DFINITY committed to fund larger teams at 2x the proposed amounts for smaller teams, this implies that a max allocation could be $56k per month if all teams selected are large teams for each proposal topic. If you calculate the total cost for all teams that have applied, it amounts to $75.5k. This is only 35% higher than what has already been committed. Yet at this higher funding level it will support all 9 teams with a total of 29 participants who have applied for these grants. This extra expense seems well worth it to give everyone a shot at making a name for themselves as credible reviewers of these topics.
I’m very excited about the fact that so many people have applied for these grants and would love to see max participation in technical proposal reviews. Please consider increasing the funding support. If an increased funding level would be a pain point for the distribution of DFINITY grant funds, then perhaps that would become a positive motivating factor for DFINITY to expedite moving past the grant program and into a long term solution.