💸Funding Round Mar'23 - Aug'23
Proposal: Allocate OSMO from the Community Pool to the Osmosis Support Lab Multisig Wallet.
Since the OSL's restructuring last quarter, we've taken the support we've historically provided to the Osmosis community to the next level. Per our last proposal, we've built tooling that improves quality of life for Osmosis users and node operators and ramped up community engagement efforts during the bear market to welcome more people into the community.
We have heard the community feedback on a 6-month vs a 3-month. Due to market conditions, the Support Lab will move forward with a 6-month proposal to continue delivering the quality support that the Osmosis community has come to expect, as well as continue to drive strong community engagement with new and ongoing initiatives, the Osmosis Support Lab is requesting 592,820 OSMO to fund operations for the months of March through August of 2023. Should any of these funds not be used, they shall be rolled over into subsequent proposal cycles and used to offset any subsequent funding requests. A detailed description of the highlights and expenditures from last quarter and our proposed deliverables moving forward can be found below.
Accomplishments Last Quarter
In addition to providing round the clock Osmosis user support, the OSL has launched a number of public goods and community initiatives aimed at improving user experience and increasing engagement efforts during the bear market. Here's a breakdown of what we've been working on:
Continued to Provide Best-In-Class Community Support for Osmosis: In the year since its inception, the Osmosis Support Lab has set the standard for community support in the interchain ecosystem. We provide a 24/7 support network across all of Osmosis's official social channels, as well as on Osmosis's support website at https://support.osmosis.zone/. We support multiple classes of Osmosis users including:
End Users: We assist with onboarding and supporting Osmosis end-users into the ecosystem. This includes answering support inquiries, troubleshooting technical issues, and maintaining infrastructure like the support website and verification / scam deterrent bots that protect users from common scams that plague the industry. User experience is at the core of Osmosis's philosophy, and the Osmosis Support Lab drastically improves the experience for Osmosis users. Here are some statistics from the Osmosis Support Website Live chat in this last quarter:
Total Tickets: >544
Average time to close a ticket: 36 minutes
Satisfaction Rating: 88%
Additionally, we've resolved >211 Discord support tickets in the same time period.
Node Operators: The OSL supports node operators by communicating state breaking upgrades and troubleshooting simple setup issues. In so doing, we provide assistance to relayers and other critical infrastructure providers for the network and the broader IBC ecosystem.
Core and Community Developers: One of the Support Lab's key functions is to act as a conduit between the Osmosis core development contributors, the rest of the community, and community developers. When a bug or issue is discovered with Osmosis, the support team on the front lines is usually the first to hear about it. We then communicate these issues with development contributors and assist in further troubleshooting the issue by gathering more information from the affected user(s). This helps get bugs resolved more quickly and efficiently.
Launched Support.Osmosis.Zone v2.0: Thanks to the swift design work of the product team at Osmosis Labs, the second iteration of the Osmosis Support Website is live! Maintained by the Osmosis Support Lab, the website contains instructional guides, answers to frequently asked questions, and a 24/7 live support chat that connects you with a member of the OSL to get support regardless of your timezone. You can interact with the support site by visiting https://support.osmosis.zone/
Construction and Maintenance of Public Goods for the Osmosis Ecosystem: As set forth in our previous funding proposal, the Support Lab has endeavored to build out infrastructure and tooling that improves the Osmosis user, node operator, and developer experience. This quarter, we've launched and continue to maintain the following public goods for the community:
OSL Relayer: We've begun relaying IBC transfers back and forth from Osmosis to 6 chains on a 24 hour basis including Mars Chain, Evmos, Stargaze, Cosmos Hub, Axelar, and Medibloc. Additionally, the OSL is equipped to relay transactions on any chain for which there is a downtime. This allows us to clear stuck packets as soon as a downtime is reported, rather than having to track down the entity relaying on that channel. This helps ensure a better UX for Osmosis users. The OSL relayer operation has relayed over 19,200 transactions in the last 30 days, and consistently ranks in the top 5 relayers in the Cosmos ecosystem by 24-hour transaction volume.
RPC Infrastructure: Distributed nodes support a healthy, decentralized network. Public RPC endpoints allow interaction with the network without the need to provide the back-end server infrastructure. Running this infrastructure is a vital public good for the Osmosis community, as it allows developers and users to experiment with Osmosis in a cost-minimized manner, ensuring that cost doesn't deter necessary activity. Our RPC server has had 29,096,651 requests from 2,621 unique users in the last 14 days with an outbound transfer volume of 920GB, indicating substantial reliance by Osmosis node operators on the OSL's infrastructure.
Launched and Maintained Community Engagement Initiatives: In the last quarter, we've carried on community initiatives begun by the Osmosis Ministry of Marketing and launched new initiatives aimed at increasing community engagement during the bear market. These are the initiatives we're currently running:
Osmosis Community Updates Blog: The Osmosis Community Updates blog is one of the largest community-run blogs that covers Osmosis. It releases weekly articles on new token listings, upcoming airdrops, new product integrations with Osmosis, and covers all major chain upgrades. As indicated by the stats below, the blog is a significant source of community engagement with Osmosis even in the bear market, boasting nearly 120 unique visitors per day, 15,755 Minutes read, and 12,718 Views last quarter. Projects integrating with Osmosis are welcome to submit articles and gain exposure for their project, while also ensuring the community stays up to date with new Osmosis integrations. For those unfamiliar with the blog, we encourage you to read some of the content for yourself by visiting https://medium.com/osmosis-community-updates
Osmosis Community Updates Twitter: The Osmosis Community Updates twitter account is a significant source of engagement and community outreach for Osmosis. The account has over 14,400 followers, and reaches the broader Osmosis community and beyond with educational content, update announcements, and fun giveaways and competitions.
Osmosis Crew3: Crew3 is a community games and quests platform that rewards community members for completing challenges related to an integrated chain like Osmosis. The OSL maintains the Crew3 questboard for the Osmosis community and hosts regular giveaways to reward community content creation and for completing educational tasks on the platform. This initiative has had a notable effect on community engagement, driving over 1000 new members to the Osmosis discord, and gaining the Osmosis Community Updates twitter account over 2800 new followers.
Maintained the Osmosis Community Incentives Programs on Reddit and Discord: The Osmosis Community Incentives Program was created to help foster community engagement on Discord and Reddit. Per our latest funding proposal, a portion of our funding has been directed each month to a wallet meant to be used by the Discord and Reddit admins to use to reward community members that participate in community support and engagement. This quarter, reddit incentives were used to put OSMO directly into the hands of Osmosis redditors that contribute meaningfully to the discussions on that forum, and help other users with support issues. On discord, incentives were deployed to fund community engagement events and giveaways, particularly for giveaways that helped grow the Crew3 audience. For transparency purposes, the wallet addresses for the respective incentives programs can be found below:
Discord Incentives Wallet: osmo1cm5m47cqtk55hsz5jpfesszy7gl7fk8s3d3wvj
Please note: The above address will be changing. We will update it here as soon as a new incentive wallet is created and funds are transferred.
Reddit Incentives Wallet: osmo1kn0upwprug772v2ph9sylsfgfercdjf7k7fktx
Twitter/Giveaway Incentives Wallet: osmo1xsfcdpmvh6xdvmaecll6620yx50x5mjw9rhnfz
Osmosis Support Lab Multisig Wallet
The Osmosis Support Lab treasury address has changed with the parting of one of our signers. The previous multsig address was osmo1rsc56qdxmkdequ4y00900xrf24xdkqzv8ap5ln. The new address is another 4 of 7 multisig wallet with the address osmo1jntsj9h7nkf8388xug2qxy6nlpvxw7kng9gk0k. The seven multisig signers are as follows:
Workerbee3 (Support / Tooling / Reddit Admin)
Max Power (Support / Tooling Admin)
Kych (Art and Blog Management / Support Admin)
Togg LeTek (Social Media and Content Management / Tooling Admin)
Waterspinner (Support / Tooling Admin)
Jasbanza (Support / Tooling Admin)
Arcmosis (Support Admin)
As of March 14th 2023, the previous multisig funds have not been transferred. We will ensure this is updated with a transaction id when this happens.
Transparency
The Support Lab maintains a publicly available google drive folder reflecting all of our paid invoices and various transparency / spending reports. That drive link is included here for ease of access: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hWz4VI8ECoXDU6aERfdFy9B_z2XYxbh9
Please note: This link might break in the near future. We are working to switch Cloud Drive providers to a self-hosted NextCloud to reduce the Google Workspace spend. We will do our due diligence to update this link as soon as it becomes available.
Funding Goals and Projected Budget
The following is the estimated budget upon which this proposal is based. These numbers are derived from our experience managing our existing funding over the last year. The Support Lab has elected to ask the community for a sufficient sum of OSMO to fund operations for 6 months. As with previous proposal iterations, this operating budget will help to keep us accountable to the community by requiring us to return to governance on a bi-annual basis to replenish our treasury. This will give the community adequate time to review our performance and suggest changes to the manner in which we operate before any additional funding is allocated to the Support Lab treasury. See below for the proposal’s budgeting spreadsheet and a brief explanation of some of the line items contained therein:
Staffing
Due to personal reasons we have had five members resign their position. We wish them the very best and thank them for their service. They fully intend to remain active participants of the Osmosis community, so if you see them around say hi!
Due to these members leaving we have restructured our team to ensure Discord still has 24/7 coverage. Moving forward you will see job titles such as: Support Admin, Tooling Admin, and Content Admin. This is to delineate where an admins particular focuses are.
Internal Accountability Measures
Last proposal we introduced the Osmosis Support Lab Constitution. This document was to act as our guiding principles and mission statement. We've taken a great leap forward by further ratifying changes and updates to better reflect our goals moving forward including steps and procedures that allow for the Support Lab membership to take significant accountability measures, as well as introduce a joint Support Lab/Community review per funding cycle. Take a look at the updated constitution here: https://nc.osl.zone/s/constitution
As we move forward, this will be a living document. Amendments are already in the works for further refining and clarifying points.
Coordination Council
As part of our effort to reorganize, we have added roles to aid in internal accountability as well as ensure we are consistently upholding our promise to the Community and ourselves. Recently the Support Lab membership elected these members to the Coordination Council:
Support Pillar: Rose (Support / Content Member) || Telegram
Tooling Pillar: Coldchain (Tooling / Support Member) || Telegram
Content Pillar: Togg LeTek (Content / Tooling Member) || Discord
Pay
In keeping with the restructuring proposal from last quarter, pay scales have been flattened out so that all support staff are paid equally. As with the previous proposal, support staff receive a monthly stipend of $4,000 USD paid as $2,000 USD twice a month. This pay will generally be distributed a stablecoin pegged to the United States Dollar, however, at times, pay may be distributed as a combination of assets in order to equal the correct USD price point.
Additionally, Multisig signer pay has been eliminated in an attempt to reduce costs.
The Graphic Designer and Content Manager role compensation also remains unchanged from the previous proposal.
You can find a comprehensive list of all current members of the Support Lab as well as our contact information at https://support.osmosis.zone/about
Public Goods
This line item would cover the relayer and RPC infrastructure costs for this 6-month proposal cycle. As noted above, these services have been highly popular with Osmosis users and node operators and have resulted in an improvement in the Osmosis user experience. At a combined monthly cost of $250, this represents a strong return on investment for the Osmosis community.
The Support Lab is able to provide these services at such a low cost to the community by having technically skilled personnel on staff working on that stuff in the course of their regular duties.
Website / Software - Live Chat
This line item will fund the live chat software on the https://support.osmosis.zone/ website. This proposal cycle, we have switched live chat providers to helpcrunch, a trusted provider relied upon by other Cosmos ecosystem projects like Keplr. Notably, making this change has resulted in a cost savings of over $10,000 vs previous proposal cycles.
Website / Software - Content Creation
This line item will allow for us to continue to commission instructional guides for the Osmosis support website. We have a backlog of content that we're working to add to the website, but additional suggestions are always welcome, and we encourage members of the community to contact us at any time to suggest new article ideas.
Website / Software - Software
This line item reflects software subscriptions that are necessary to perform our daily work (slack, google workspaces).
Website / Software - Web Developer (Alternative Osmosis Front End)
As part of our ongoing efforts to build tooling that will help improve the Osmosis user experience, the OSL is working on an alternative front end for Osmosis. The purpose of this alt-front end is to allow Osmosis users to continue to interact with the chain while the main website is down and access an alternative Osmosis experience, which helps decentralize the chain's access points. The Support Lab's designers have worked up a proof of concept for the site, as shown in the screenshot below, but we need to retain an external web developer to properly configure and maintain the front end. This funds allocation will cover these costs.
Website / Software - Bot Maintenance
We will use these funds to fund ongoing bot maintenance for the various Osmosis social channels including:
Osmosis Telegram Bot (FAQ commands, anti bot raid / scam bot)
Osmosis Telegram Tip Bot
Osmosis Discord Governance Proposal Bot
Osmosis Discord Tip Bot
Community Incentive Program
Due to the ongoing success of the Community Incentives Program, we'd like to continue this valuable initiative. These funds will be used to reward community members that make valuable contributions to Osmosis and help to onboard new users. We want to encourage the Osmosis community to help and support each other, and to be able to give generously to those that do. Do you maintain an active presence in Telegram, Discord, Reddit, or Twitter assisting others but are not an OSL admin? This fund is for you. Do you put together written materials or instructional videos for the sole purpose of helping your fellow Osmonauts? This fund is for you. The Community Incentive Program will ensure that community funds are available to community members that provide value to the ecosystem.
This proposal cycle, we also intend to supplement the community incentives we provide to the Osmosis community by launching an NFT project at no cost. Expect to hear more on this project soon!
Contingency Fund
The purpose of this fund is to deal with any unexpected expenses and ensure that we can continue to build without any interruptions in service. Some examples of uses for this fund would include a need for additional staff in the event of a hyper-growth event for the Osmosis ecosystem or to fund projects and bounties that were not accounted for in the budget. Should this fund not be used, it will be rolled over to subsequent proposals to reduce the size of the next proposal request.
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