Initially, this was presented as THE Cosmos Hub Grant program to basically manage most of the funds in the community pool to fund any kind of projects (not focused on some specific area) and receive a large salary for this, and the people to manage this self-appointed them for this.
In our experience, preparing a draft proposal and answering all the questions from the overall community is hard, however we would still prefer this than 7 people controlling all funding decisions of the community pool.
Could the process be improved? Definitely, but absolutely not how it is presented in this proposal, here are some ideas:
-Define the funding strategy: what are the priorities for the Cosmos Hub to decide which projects to fund or what would be the sourcing strategy? Then, all these projects should be organised in many different categories. After this, the best experts from the overall Cosmos community for each funding area should be selected by the community (not self-appointed) to have the best possible expertise in each funding area. Once all this is defined, then a specific DAO could be created for each funding area, the amount of funding for each expertise specific DAO would be defined and so on.
-The goal of the grants should be to bring value to the Cosmos Hub, not just to give grants, so it is a bit like seed investments, and we all know even the best investors and VCs only invest in a few successful projects among many investments. Are we expecting 7 self-appointed people to provide best or similar results as large teams with decades of experience in investing? This is highly unlikely. If we want to use the funds in the community pool more actively to bring value to the Cosmos Hub this is great, but designing this strategy should be a great effort by the whole Cosmos community with a multitude of very expertise specific DAOs. What is proposed here, a single group of 7 self-appointed people to decide about all grants decisions and using the Osmosis grants program as an example doesn’t seem very promising. In fact, the Osmosis grants program shouldn’t be used as an example, we should aim to create a much better system to bring real value to the Cosmos Hub.