To be clear, this is the initial ask to trial the grants system.
At the end of this period, we will have a retrospective with the community to determine next steps. Ideally everything goes excellently, and we can just scale the system up. Additionally, we’re starting the grants process internally — facing the core Jupiter community, we also have drafts for a ecosystem-facing grants program which will come at some point as well. But it’s important for us to figure the internal facing grants first.
Additionally, the CWG and Uplink were both granted trial budgets by the team — as we both have extensive Web3 work history and social reputation, as well as have all received multiple grants from the Solana foundation for our work on prior organizations. So, we’re a bit unique in our composistion.
As far as your questions about trials, my largest takeaway from the Reddit and Web WG’s was that their trials were too short at 3 months. CWG stretched our trial budget to ~5 months, Uplink was even longer. It takes time to establish meaningful work history and a strong relationship with the DAO.
As far as experts who are extremely competent in their field — the nature of public work makes this a difficult task and has made hiring difficult. Most highly competitant people aren’t willing to accept the same level of pay for a much more stressful public work environment. Either that, or, they don’t know the nature of public work — as there are very, very, few people in the world that have ever done it in this fashion. IMO — the grants process is a great introduction to it either way