New Build: Bulk Uploader for Gitcoin Grants Registry

[owocki]

In the review of Metacamp 2023 QF Round, I wrote

@owocki

… we did not feel like an “application period” was the right fit for an unconference style social community like Metacamp at all.

1. People were busy surfing and hiking, they were not checking telegram often. So they could not be relied upon to submit a grant.
2. While most people would feel fine receiving funding for contributing to the public goods of the event, people would likely not want to be seen seeking funding for it.

For this reason, we figured that if we accepted applications for the round, we would have had about ¼ of the participation as if we just loaded all of the attendees into the round (100% participation).

But what were the privacy implications of loading everyone into the round? The event itself was ticketed via NFTs, so everyone’s information was on chain already. But we felt that we could not proceed without allowing attendees the opportunity to opt out.

After giving attendees the opportunity to opt out, we proceeded to ingest the attendee database into the granting system. But we hit another wrinkle, Gitcoin’s system expected everyone to submit their own grant application. And there is no bulk uploader for a round manager to simply create the grants on behalf of their attendees.

We worked around this by assembling a crack team of DAO nerds that was in charge of ingesting all of the grants into the system and then transferring the grants to the users themselves. This ride or ride crew took about 45 minutes to clean and ingest the 40 participants to the event (plus 4 locals who were helping out) into the Grants system.

TLDR - At Metacamp, we were able to upload everyone into the grants registry by mechanical turk-ing it (having humans brute force apply for all the grants)

This was a rather inefficient way to get the grants into the round, so @carlb and I have been working to automate it.

With that preface out of the way, I present you with our latest build out!

Bulk Uploader for Gitcoin Grants Registry

What: Using this tool, a round-manager can upload a CSV: + apply for grants in a round.
Why: It is currently cumbersome to upload projects to a Gitcoin Grants Registry
Watch the demo video for more
How: See below:

Demo: https://grants-stack-bulk-uploader.vercel.app/ (use at your own risk)
Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Ax1v9L1C4
Code: https://github.com/supermodularxyz/grants-stack-bulk-uploader

[meglister]

Love this new use case and build! One thing to noodle on – have you thought about how to mitigate spam submissions? Given that the tool makes it so easy to upload applications, we could potentially see a higher rate of fraud/spam.

[owocki]

@meglister

have you thought about how to mitigate spam submissions?

I have not. The use case that we used this for (metacamp), we were both the applier and the reviewer, so it was not an issue.

It seems like spam applications could be an issue with all Allo rounds, but that this tool just magnifies that issue. Off the top of my head, perhaps one way to mitigate spam would be to ask grant applicants to stake some tokens on their applications legitimacy. If they are rejected, then the round manager could decide to either return the tokens (for an honest mistake) or send the tokens to the matching pool.

[meglister]

Yep all makes sense. Excited to see it working for your use case and to see where it goes!