Welcome Badgeholders!

• Badgeholders (you!) play an essential role in the success of FIL-RetroPGF.�
• Your judgement will directly determine the amount of funding a project receives.�
• Good judgement will translate to sustaining and causing new impact to happen in the Filecoin ecosystem.

Administrative Items

• Voting Period
• Apr 24th - May 9th
• Enabling Voting - Wallet Addresses
• Authentication to enable voting is done through a wallet address.
• Please provide the wallet address you wish to use for RetroPGF voting in the “Wallet Addresses” topic in the Telegram group.

Guiding Principles I

• Impact signifies the value a contributor has created for the Filecoin ecosystem.�
• Profit signifies the value a contributor has extracted from the Filecoin ecosystem.�
• The gap signifies the difference between a contributor’s impact and profit (e.g. impact - profit = the gap).
1. The job of the badgeholder is to determine this gap.�
• FIL-RetroPGF-1 will fill the gap between a contributor's impact and profit, resulting in a state of impact = profit.

Guiding Principles II - Determining Impact

• Impact
• Retroactive
• Only past impact is considered
• Impact measurement should not include any consideration for potential future contributions. For example:
• How much impact will this project have in the future?
• How important are rewards to enable their work?
• This is for funding in future RetroPGF rounds.
• Focus on outcomes, not inputs
• Effort, while important, is not a criteria for determining impact in FIL-RetroPGF-1
• And signalling future outcomes is banned
• Project needed to have provided during the window of impact between Oct 2023 - Mar 2024.
• This is independent of the when the work was completed.
• As an extreme example, software that was written 10 years ago and not maintained since is eligible if it has provided impact within the impact-window.�
• Do categories matter?
• No — there are no predetermined amounts of funding allocated to each category.
• Comparing projects in the same category should help in determining impact and allocation.

Guiding Principles III - Determining Profit

• Profit — Total value a contributor has extracted from the Filecoin ecosystem�
• Examples of value extraction:
• Funding received to perform work (Ecosystem Grants)
• Payments of annual fee in USD to service provider
• Paying for services, fees for trading, etc ..��
• Profit must be evaluated under imperfect information - a difficult problem! Badgeholders:
• Are encouraged to source information on profit through side channels available to them, and take this into account.
• Use corroborated evidence of misrepresentations on the application when determining votes.
• Badgeholders are strongly encouraged to share this information with other badgeholders in the private Telegram group to reduce information asymmetry and arrive at the best possible decision.
• Should put special emphasis on projects that are transparent in reporting profits
• Sends a signal to projects that it is beneficial to be transparent
• Should not penalize applications for providing only information requested of them.
• Suggest application form updates for Round 2, instead!

Voting Process

• Review Applications fil-retropgf.io
• Collaborate, discuss, source knowledge with other badgeholders in the Telegram Group
• Submit votes
• Badgeholders can allocate up to 100 total votes
• A single application can receive at most 16 votes per Badgeholder
• Important: There is a difference between abstaining from voting and voting 0!
• Abstaining from voting for a project expresses indifference (insufficient data provided by application, or insufficient expertise of badgeholder to make a judgement)
• Assigning a project a 0 vote actively expresses the view that the project should not be funded.
• Badgeholders can also flag projects they think are ineligible and should be removed.
• Submitting a ballot is final, no changes can be made after that!�
• Video tutorial for voting interface

Votes → Allocation

• quorum = 5
• score_fn = “mean”
• min_score = 0�
• Chosen to maximize the likelihood that we observe a smooth and equitable distribution of funds.
• Justification for parameter selection

Code of Conduct

• Conflicts of Interest must be disclosed in the “Badgeholder Conflict of Interest” Topic in Telegram
• We intend to share publicly that a CoI was disclosed for a given project, and so a badgeholder removed themselves from voting on it, but not to make the identity of badgeholder who declared the CoI publicly available.
• Offers for external compensation for voting a certain way must be disclosed.
• Badgeholders should not vote for any projects for where they expect any portion of funds to flow to them.
• No private voting to obscure self-dealing.
• Organizers reserve the right to perform audits at the end of voting.

FAQ and Q&A summary

• Will badgeholder votes be public? The individual votes of a badgeholder are not public.
• Will badgeholders be able to see others’ votes? No.
• How will future badgeholders be chosen? A governance process will be created to expand the badgeholder set. Some current badgeholders will leave, and new ones arrive. Size of the group is expected to grow.
• Is there a dashboard to see the ballots in real time? No, but this could be a requested feature, could introduce if there is demand and justification.
• Should badgeholders take each project’s received funding into consideration when voting? Yes, this is a key part of equalising the equation Profit = Impact, which is central to Optimism-RetroPGF, on which FIL-RetroPGF-1 is based.
• Has anyone audited the funding that was submitted? No, this level of scrutiny and decision making is outside operational scope. Badgeholders are encouraged to check information supplied where possible, seeking clarifications and corrections if errors are found.
• What is the badgeholder comment function in applications for? To share any additional information not in the application that the badgeholder thinks will be of interest to other badgeholders or the wider community.
• If applications misrepresent their funding amount should they be funded? Unintentional errors should be flagged to badgeholders, and ideally corrected by commenting on the application, to reduce information asymmetry and give a trackable flow of information. For many applicants estimating the profit was difficult, so badgeholders should bear in mind that an approximation is reasonable. If applicants give insufficient information, badgeholders need not express a view (no vote). Badgeholders may also express a view of 0 funding if they believe an applicant should not be funded. Applications can be reported to organisers to be removed if information is intentionally misleading and not corrected.
• Can badgeholders vote for applications they’re involved in? No.
• What happens if they do? Badgeholders are the most important people in the process as the decision makers who decide how funds are allocated. If misaligned with the principles of FIL-RetroPGF and intentionally circumventing rules for personal gain, round organisers will make an assessment on a case by case basis of how to resolve if possible (but allocations/seats could be voided).
• Should badgeholders take into account what applicants say they will do with the funding? No, references to future funding plans or potential future impact are not allowed.
• What does funding gap mean? See slide 4.
• Are we only funding public goods? What is a public good? The program exists to close the gap between impact and funding that public goods traditionally see. That said, many goods are mixed goods, and many forms of impact are only partially non-rivalrous or partially non-excludable. The badgeholders are asked to exercise nuanced judgement in the complex task of estimating the amount of funds to allocate.
• Will there be physical badges? The organising committee would also like to see this. Let’s see!