General scoring rubric

[saintsal]

This is a generalised scoring rubric for grants, which creates evaluation and operational consistency, and makes it easier and faster to give actionable feedback on unaccepted applications. It should be appended with more specific criteria for each stream.

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Eligibility

Binary score. If any are not true, the application is considered ineligible.

Funds are not directly related to hiring new people

Evaluation

Each of the 3 categories is rated 0-3, giving a total score of 0-9.

Concept - is it viable and aligned with the funding goals?

• Greatly progresses the Polygon ecosystem
• Takes advantage of unique Polygon characteristics, and/or creates unique advantages for Polygon users

Outcomes - Will it achieve impact?

• Attracts engaged Polygon users
• Realistic plans to validate the effectiveness of the outcomes

Capability - can they do it?

• Core team has adequate experience (and advisors) to see the funded project to completion
• All core competencies required to achieve the milestones are executed by the core team. (No core competancy is outsourced.)
• The action plan is reasonable, and the amount requested is congruent to the work necessary and team skill

Scoring

For each of each of the 3 above criteria, provide a score (half points allowed)

0 - Poor
Some basic criteria are not addressed
1 - Weak
The proposal addresses the criteria, but there are fundamental gaps or weaknesses
2 - Good
The proposal addresses the criterion well, but shortcomings may be present
3 - Excellent
The proposal successfully addresses all relevant aspects of the criterion, with only minor shortcomings

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Appending criteria for different streams

To illustrate how this rubric should be extended to include more specific criteria, these would be the additional criteria for Season 0:

Note: these criteria are in addition to the general criteria above.

Eligibility

Demonstrated proof-of-concept, either on-chain functionality with real users, or a proof-of-concept with a community

Concept

• Demonstrates demand (TVL, unique addresses, community size)
• Proof-of-concept reveals which aspects work and which need attention

Outcomes

• Specifically targets number of polygon users at each milestone
• Impact ROI (Targeted users per $1000 granted) is on-par or better than currently accepted grants
• Demonstrates momentum towards next milestones

Capability

• The team will execute this project with or without the grant
• The team is capable of articulating their challenges in a timely and concise fashion

Or, for a grant stream specific to retrospective acknowledgement:

Eligibility

Has deployed functionality on Polygon

Concept

• Demonstrates demand (TVL, unique addresses, community size)

Outcomes

• Has social media reach > 1000 users
• Has 50+ Polygon users with a Polyscore of 40+.

Capability

• The team has skin-in-the-game to continue the project for the next 3-6 months

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Living documents

These rubrics (the general and stream-specific) are intended to be living documents, changed based on some form of active governance and management.

This allows the grant program to be adaptive to externalities and to real-time learning that can improve performance.

When combined with cohort-based measurements, we can all see how they change various results, as we can separate performance of cohorts based on differing versions. When committed on-chain, they provide an immutable, trustable history and open possibilities to compose grants operation with other useful governance functionality.