Things were moving slower with the city because I was waiting for a reply from Antonija. In the end she did reply negatively which means that we need to find other department to go with. Luckily the city runs their public goods funding through a large number of independent departments and companies.
Because of this, I researched all the departments and their grant programs, scraped from the internet any documentation I could find for each of them and uploaded to Overview of Split’s grants. Then I’ve analysed the documents for purpose of understanding what documentation is needed to run a grant program in Croatia (and EU). Finally, I’ve collected some of the administrative documents that are made in process of running a grant program. This served to understand the timeline needed for a grant program and the administrative burden imposed by it.
Croatia applies EU rules when it runs municipal grant programs, and this data and conclusions from it will be applicable across the EU.
I have identified 3 programs for funding public goods that pose as the best opportunities for application and piloting QF in municipalities:
After this I’ve reached out to the CEO of municipal company Parkovi i nasadi that manages Split’s green spaces, green markets and street illumination. Lucikly, they are already running a crowdfunding campaign for small scale interventions in green spaces. They are willing to try this out if we can contribute to the matching pool. I promised I will try to raise €50k (spread over 2 rounds) from our web3 partners, if they will negotiate with the City to match it with the same amount (or greater) for maintenance costs because the benches, trees and other installations require continuous maintenance over the years. The good thing is that there are almost no administrative or legal steps needed for us to run this. As soon as we build the tooling, we can start the round.
After making all the arrangements for interventions in green spaces, I’d like to get city’s departments responsible for grants in culture and local media to join the program. Culture attracts the largest number of grant applicants and local media have the largest platform for reaching out to the public. However, these require some level of administrative and legal work so I believe that, even if we get their commitment, it will take some time until we are ready to run the first round. Running a successful and well publicised round for green spaces will definitely help get them committed.
There are still talks to be done on this, but one other way to speed things up could be to combine the idea of independent small grant round and local media theme. We could run our own Gitcoin grant round for local media, without waiting for or expecting any administrative work from the city. This could help us get lot of publicity because the media would need to promote their proposals to get the funding. If we run this round during green spaces round, we could increase the public visibility even more for both.
I will be completing a plan for the project execution and a proposal for funding from Gitcoin, Ethereum Foundation and others in the coming 2 weeks.
Things done
- Scraped all grants documentation from city’s website, it’s under Overview of Split’s grants
- Analysed the city’s grant programmes
- Documentation Anatomy of a municipal grant
- Administrative steps Lifecycle of a municipal grant
- Analysed Gitcoin grant programmes
- Phases Anatomy of a Gitcoin grant
- Activities
- Planning for the green spaces grants
Meetings
- Antonija Eremut, head of department for city development
- Vedrana Franić, deputy head of department for city development
- Siniša Gašparević, CEO of Parkovi i nasadi
- Marina Petreš Kuzmanić, head of department for culture
- Tanja Vukušić, manager at Hotel Split
Residency
I talked with manager at Hotel Split about possibility of hosting the residency there. I went there and checked out the hotel and open spaces. It’s clear that the latest we can do the residency in Split, before the season starts, is March. The biggest issue is that the Easter is early this year which means that they start getting reservations for end of March already. Unfortunately, after some consideration, the Hotel answered they can’t accommodate us.
I’ll be searching for other options.
Other
I reached out to RadicalxChange Foundation, they liked the project and want to support us.
There is a possibility for Funding the Commons x Schelling Point Session at Split Blockchain Week next year. I’d like to discuss that.
I am participating in the Gitcoin Desci round ops team to run the next round.