As I await the final tally (and USDC amount) for PlaceCred’s Token Engineering Commons (TEC) Gitcoin Grant, I thought I’d start with the least fun task, Accountability. As Mark Twain said, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning” 🐸😅

Fortunately, web3 is finally realizing accountability is a *massive problem*. I used to hate accountability. Especially of the corporate variety. I’ve cringed at every major crypto project spinning up traditional grant programs, complete with projects spending 30-40% of their time creating reports nobody reads.

Fact is, not having accountability is as bad for grantees as it is for treasuries. Accountability, it turns out, is a basic human need. Not having it may feel great at first. But without the feedback and motivation accountability provides, initial excitement fades into decay. It’s like having a potted plant and giving it sunlight but no water. Eventually it meets the fate of most actual plants I’ve owned.

PlaceCred, like most Gitcoin Grants, is on the honor system. If I don’t deliver what I promised, there are likely few consequences. Maybe my informal reputation suffers. But for the most part, nobody has the time for that. It’s no surprise there’s already a small army of ‘grant farmers’ jumping from project to project draining DAO treasuries.

My accountability strategy for PlaceCred has two prongs:

• Get attention: Most accountability in the world comes not from formal mechanisms, but emerges organically, from repeated conversations and collaborations. From *attention*. Without a boss, KPIs, or other formal accountability mechanisms, I need attention. My plan is to get it by building in public, writing blogs for larger updates, posting smaller updates on the @PlaceCred Twitter/X, having conversations with those that engage, open sourcing any code I write on Github, etc.

• Get Cred: I plan to gain reputation by posting updates to PlaceCred’s Karma_GAP profile. Karma_GAP is an experimental on-chain ‘visibility and accountability protocol’ for public goods (PG), which I’m excited to see. It allows grantees of Gitcoin grants and other public goods (PG) projects to post self reports on-chain. Those updates are automatically published on-chain via the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS). So I’ll be building up on-chain reputation for PlaceCred’s ETH address along the way. This introduces additional incentives, albeit in a hypothetical future way. But with billions earmarked for public goods funding in the next few years, it’s reasonable to expect *some* amount of financial incentives down the line in the form of airdrops, access to funding opportunities, etc.

I did leave the question in the Karma profile about timelines empty...Can’t have too much accountability now 😅

Honestly, I would like to set milestones and timelines, to build more accountability for myself. But I’m still grappling with the scope of the work. As I start to survey the relevant literature, with the aid of ChatGPT, the potential scope of what I’ve proposed is expanding rapidly. Fields of knowledge I never knew existed are appearing before me at an alarming rate. When I visualize it in my mind’s eye, the fields of knowledge appear as an unfolding 2D grid, 80s cyberpunk style, with me flying over the grid in a little space ship. Which DALLE was happy to render 🤯

If you’re excited about this work please follow @PlaceCred and help me narrow this down!