In this report, we present an overview of the progress and impact achieved by the Coordination Team from April to August 2023, in alignment with the commitments outlined in our last funding proposal (Apr-Jul). In addition to the objectives set in the funding proposal, we have also undertaken various other initiatives aimed at enhancing our programs and community engagement. This report serves as a comprehensive tracker of our journey in these past months.
TEC Coordination Team Performance Poll:
We’ve set up a pol.is poll with 16 statements to gather your feedback on our recent performance. Please take just 10 minutes to share your thoughts; your input is valuable and will help us improve and grow. Access the poll here!
Promised in the last Funding Proposal:
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Run the first Gitcoin quadratic funding round targeted exclusively at token engineering.
- We have successfully launched and executed the first TE Grant Round, with a focus on supporting public goods related to education, research, or tooling in the token engineering field. The round distributed a total of $31,161.85 among 16 unique projects. If you want to learn all the details and results of the round, you can check them out here. Additionally, if you’d like a more in-depth analysis of our experiences and lessons learned from the round, feel free to read this fantastic article.
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Integrated TEA’s NFT proofs into the new grant program and activated students in funding grant projects with quadratic funding.
- As part of the execution of the first TE Grant Round, we went a step further by introducing some innovation in the way we fund public goods through Quadratic Funding (QF). This involved integrating Subject Matter Expertise from the TE community, through some code to provide a “boost” to donations from wallets holding $TEC tokens and TEA NFTs from graduates. This experiment brought really interesting results, which you can learn more about here.
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Submitted at least two grant pitches to large matching fund partners for the grants program, like ENS and Ethereum Foundation.
- The TEC Coordination Team secured an ENS Large Grant for $50K on behalf of both the TEC and TEA. The proceeds were split evenly between both organizations and the corresponding TEC’s share of the grant provided the necessary funding for the upcoming TE Grants Rounds, alleviating the need to rely on the Common Pool to secure funding. This aligns with our objective of establishing financial sustainability for the program by sourcing external funding rather than depleting resources from the Common Pool.
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Developed a new set of processes for scalable, accountable community organizing and engagement, including the launch of a TEC advisory network.
- This initiative has gained increasing relevance over the past few months for the TEC. It is primarily driven by the initiation of a series of recurring calls among key community members, with less direct involvement from the Coordination Team. Soon, there will be more communications from this group in an attempt to define a purpose and formalize a structure for the TEC Advisory Network.
Additional Impact:
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Second TE Grants Round and development of the TE Grants Program. This round saw a huge upswell in public awareness and engagement around funding token engineering as a public good. It has also greatly increased awareness for the TEC itself, a critical step in the TEC’s ability to raise funds to replenish the Common Pool and continue to fund token engineering efforts.
- The team submitted and received approval for a new funding proposal to support both Round 2 (scheduled for August 2023) and Round 3 (TBD) of the TE Grants Program. This reflects the community’s strong commitment to continuously funding TE public goods in an impactful and sustainable manner for the Commons.
- The TE Grants Round 2 was planned and successfully executed by the team, with a primary focus on supporting public goods related to education, research, and tooling within the token engineering field. For this round, we set the objective of growing 20% in unique donors and total contributions, maintaining an average donation of around $25, and increasing our “return on match” from 24% to 30%.
- The results from this second round showed a successful distribution of a little over $30,000 among 14 unique projects with a substantial increase in unique donors with more than 1800, as well as a significant increase in total donations, surpassing 2600. This is a growth of more than 21X and 10X in these two aspects, respectively, compared to last round!!! And despite a slight decrease in the total donation amount ($5,280.75) and in the average contribution per donor ($2.88), we saw this as a clear sign of the reach this round has achieved, along with the ongoing and growing interest in TE public goods within the Web3 space.
- As part of the marketing efforts for this round, we were able to achieve some great results on the TEC Twitter account. TEC Twitter gained 90 new followers, many with quite interesting backgrounds. More significantly, engagement on the TEC Twitter account has exploded. Prior to the past 2-3 months, only very rarely would one of our posts get more than a thousand views. Posts now regularly break that level, with many in the 4K and some even 12K and 13K range.
- The team has also greatly enhanced its partnership with Gitcoin, involving them fairly deeply in our promotional efforts and participating in theirs as well. We are also providing feedback to them on the evolution of the Grants Stack offering.
- The team has now created a ‘playbook’ for streamlining the planning and execution of the following rounds, providing us with more time to really think about how to improve and increase the impact of this program.
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During GG18, the TEC also submitted its own grant application for the Web3 Community & Education round, offering a matching pool of $250,000. We ranked 27th out of 238 projects, highlighting the substantial support from the community towards the work and mission of the commons.
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By continuing to be conservative in its spending, the team was able to extend its budget to cover an additional month of operations to now include August.
- Through the improvement of the team’s internal budgeting and reporting processes and a simplified compensation structure, better and more accurate forecasting practices have been achieved. This, in turn, contributed to the team extending the initial four-month timeline outlined in the proposal by an additional month. This helped eliminate the need of having to submit another funding proposal in the middle of executing the TE Grants Round, enabling the team to maintain focus on delivering.
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Despite a great deal of effort, the TEC and the Token Engineering Academy (TEA) were unable to identify a mutually acceptable path to merging the two entities. At this point, the TEA is exploring a path for having itself run by its students.
