GSE: A Financial Analysis of Guilds and Projects

[links]

@ManuelMaccou

One thing is obvious - The community was right. We are overfunding. Almost every project and guild has a significant amount of BANK leftover season after season. This shows we can achieve our priorities with less funding.

I have a few big questions with this statement:

• When did the community state that overfunding was an issue? Personally I suspected such, but I don’t remember the community ever expressing this. Was it unearthed as part of the survey the GSE did? A link to that would be helpful if so.
• How does a guild/project having BANK leftover mean that that they overspent? I feel like I’m crazy asking this but doesn’t that indicate the exact opposite - that they spent LESS than they had asked for?
• What does overspending even mean? To me, it would be something like “this normally costs $10 but we spent $20”. Can you tell me how these numbers show we are overspending?

@ManuelMaccou

First I’ll mention a disclaimer that I’m assuming this data is correct based on the findings of the Analytics Guild. If you held a leadership position in a guild or project, review the data and call out any discrepancies.

It was brought to your attention in the Discord discussion, but it feels like the methodology isn’t sophisticated enough to be making broad generalizations like “We are overfunding guilds/projects”. This is mainly due to the fact that you are using hard dates to show whether or not guilds/projects have spent requested BANK by the end of the season, but many guilds/project disbursements don’t fit with these dates.

For instance, many guilds/projects have spent 0 BANK by the end of the season in your chart, but it was because they did a single seasonal disbursement at the end of the season AFTER the hard cutoff date. Similarly, guilds/projects with monthly or regular disbursements would be counted as “overfunded” even if they spend all that money the next day.

Finally - many of these guilds/projects simply reduce funding asks by leftover amounts in the following seasonal budget cycle. Here are some examples. If surplus is deducted from the following season ask, then are they really overfunded?

@FlowScience

Using surplus as a measure of responsible spending sounds like it could encourage reckless spending simply to so budgets don’t get cut.

I completely agree with this statement. I appreciate the work that has gone into this report, but if I am being honest, I’m struggling to understand the story these numbers are telling, and I have no idea how I would use these numbers on the Grants Committee.

@ManuelMaccou

Let’s use this to reassess our funding processes, procedures, and criteria.

How do you suggest we do that? Forgive me if I’m asking stupid questions, but it all seems so hand-wavy to me. I need concrete next steps, and I’m not getting them from this spreadsheet and companion post.

Also - I noticed the GSE isn’t in the spreadsheet. You guys have >2M BANK to deploy, how much of that is left over? How much of that have you spent on this report?

What is the multisig of the GSE anyway? I see that the funds were disbursed from the BanklessDAO Treasury 2 weeks ago, and that @AboveAverageJoe bridged them to polygon, but I don’t really know how to find where they went from there.