Thanks for putting this proposal together @gavin - and thanks @Daniel @shurinov @alx and others for the contributions (I don’t know everyone’s handles).
I support the proposal as-is, as retroactive public goods funding for many months of hard work, development, and support – Namada is very lucky to benefit from a great diversity of explorers with different strengths, features, and even aesthetics. I think these allocations are generous – but also deserved. Amazing work all! 
Personally, I do not think this topic is the right place to litigate specific evaluations or amounts – I am not going to participate in that discussion here, and I think amount-debating energy would be better redirected into designing mechanisms for future evaluation. Picking amounts is hard, and we have to be really careful about accidental perverse incentives – e.g. we want contributions to Namada to be rewarded by how much they contribute to the public good, not how good people are at debating allocations on forums (which is not at all an equally distributed skill, especially considering time constraints, language barriers, etc.). I can imagine a few directions to go here:
- Split public goods funding proposals into a framework-allocations flow – where first we try to agree on a framework, including how amounts will be determined (roughly) and who will perform the evaluations (which will still require lots of human input, even with a framework) – and focus our debating energy towards coming up with a clear framework. I think we might even want to agree not to debate amounts after we’ve picked the framework and evaluators, unless there are absolutely egregious errors (e.g. the evaluator recommends allocating all the tokens to themself), and simply consider other evaluators in the future if we’re unhappy with the evaluations.
- Come up with a polling mechanism, where e.g. staked NAM bond-holders can vote, or delegate their votes to a third party, where the third parties will select allocation amounts for specific projects (the main idea here is to make picking amounts a bit more “democratic” and reduce the pressure on a single evaluating party). This comes with some disadvantages, though.
- Totally empower stewards: agree not to debate steward allocations at all, except when they specifically request feedback. If the community really doesn’t like how a particular steward in making decisions, governance can veto their proposals (and kick out the stewards). This approach requires some more “incremental” trust in the steward to perform specific evaluations, but it might be the most efficient option, and personally I think moving quickly and growing Namada’s public goods ecosystem is more important than creating more process flow around evaluations.
- In conjunction with (4), we could even empower stewards to make some PGF allocations privately, and disclose afterwards (after some period) what they’ve allocated to (after some time, the community can evaluate whether or not they’ve been doing a good job and decide whether to keep them in the position or not).
This should likely become its own topic – just wanted to share some thoughts after reading this thread.
validators will only be able to vote during the first 3.33 days (80 hours).
