The Stacks Foundation is workshopping an extension of the grants program that would enable individuals (or small groups) to engage in longer term research and development projects supporting the Stacks ecosystem. We’ve been referring to it as the ‘Stacks Residence Program’ because it has some natural alignments with similar programs outside the world of crypto (e.g. Entrepreneurs in Residence, Developers in Residence), which should help people quickly understand the concept, while appealing to new talent pools.
The basic idea of the program is to provide participants—whom we’d refer to as “Residents”—with regular, reliable funding on a monthly basis, thus enabling them to ‘go full-time’ on Stacks. Much like the grants program, the Residence Program could operate on the basis of committee approval and require Residents to have a relatively clear notion of the work that they would intend to do.
A major motivation for developing this program was to enable more longer-term and open-ended research projects, experimentation, and otherwise. Whereas the grants program is ideal for builders creating tools or providing solutions that offer clearly scoped and immediate benefits and insights to the Stacks community, the Residence program caters to those looking to explore broader problems/unanswered questions. We imagine the program serving research needs, more ongoing governance-related projects, sustained improvements to ecosystem infrastructure, and more.
A good example might look like a Researcher in Residence that takes on a question or research project whose findings could advance the ecosystem. They might be tasked with testing Stacking-based membership models with a range of businesses in different industries to determine the best possible messaging for Stacking, what psychology is at play, and plenty more.
The Foundation team, in collaboration with the Stacks community, would work closely with Residents to set research milestones and outcomes, but we’d ultimately trust them to own, lead, and deliver value on their projects.
Benefits of this structure:
- Increases number of people working on Stacks without increasing centralization
- Opens up the possibility of working on Stacks to new talent pools (students, established professionals outside crypto)
- Provides stability and autonomy to valuable contributors
- More open-ended and longer-term projects can find their way to success
- Payments are made on a regular cadence, so in the event the Resident is not working out, it can be ended early and the whole grant will have not been paid out in advance
Risks of this structure:
- A more open-ended engagement could be harder to track and hold accountable. Certain projects by nature might not have a clear deliverable within the first month or more, so in theory, someone could abuse the position for some time before we realize good work is not happening
Possible requirements:
- Must be a previous grantee that successfully delivered on a Milestone, this gives us the benefit of working with a known quantity, given this form of grant requires more trust given the less specific upfront definition
- Bi-weekly check-ins/reporting with Stacks Foundation team, monthly with the grant committee and the community at-large to field feedback
- Individuals must be subject matter experts
We’re planning to move forward with a test of this program during the quarter a noted in our Q3 OKRs, we’d love your feedback and ideas as we explore. Please feel free to drop them here or email them to [email protected]. Thanks!