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Create Metrics for Retro Funding

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Open Source Observer is helping Optimism Retro Funding allocate millions in rewards and scale to thousands of open source projects. Contribute impact metrics to help allocate these funds more effectively!

Why This Matters​

The Optimism Collective is pioneering a new economy where impact equals profit. With 850 million OP tokens dedicated to Retroactive Public Goods Funding ("Retro Funding"), Optimism aims to realign incentives to reward those who create meaningful impact within their ecosystem.

The Challenge of Measuring Impact​

Measuring and defining impact is inherently complex. This post from Optimism outlines the challenges they faced in 2024:

  • Alignment: Retro Funding has lacked a structured framework to ensure that rewards reflect the value of impactful contributions.
  • Accuracy and Fairness: Builders have expressed concerns about the accuracy of impact measurements and proportionality of rewards.
  • Consistency and Predictability: The lack of a reliable, continuous reward mechanism has made it difficult for contributors to depend on Retro Funding.

The Shift Towards Metrics-Driven Evaluations​

To address these challenges, the Optimism Collective is evolving its Retro Funding mechanism to be metrics-driven and human-guided. This approach combines quantitative data with qualitative expertise to more accurately evaluate and reward impact.

  • Continuous Rewards: Transitioning from annual rounds to ongoing impact evaluation provides consistent and predictable rewards.
  • Metrics Development: Robust, reproducible, and adaptable metrics are essential for accurately capturing the multifaceted nature of impact.
  • Correcting Market Failures: By providing reliable rewards to impactful builders in underfunded areas, Retro Funding aims to stimulate growth and innovation.

The Search for Better Metrics​

We are familiar with Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Rather than shy away from this, we need to continually search for better metrics to measure impact.

Research and data science are critical to this search. By contributing your expertise to the development of sophisticated impact metrics, you help:

  • Improve Accuracy: Ensure that rewards are fairly and proportionally distributed based on measurable impact.
  • Enhance Transparency: Provide clear insights into how impact is measured, increasing trust among builders and contributors.
  • Catalyze Growth: Identify and support new markets and innovations to accelerate the growth of the ecosystem.

Focus Areas for Impact Metrics in 2025​

There are currently two focus areas for impact metrics in 2025:

  • Onchain Builders: Projects that expand the onchain economy by increasing users, transactions, or total value locked.
  • Developer Tooling: Tools that empower developers to build more efficiently on the OP Stack and contribute to the Superchain's growth.

How You Can Help​

There are several ways to contribute impact metrics:

  1. Propose New Metrics: Design and implement novel ways to measure project health, contributor reputation, ecosystem impact, and more.

  2. Improve Existing Metrics: Help refine our current metrics by suggesting improvements to calculation methods or adding new dimensions of analysis. All our models are open source and available on GitHub.

  3. Domain-Specific Analysis: Apply metrics to specific domains (like DeFi or npm packages) to surface insights relevant to those types of builders.

Getting Started​

  1. Review our blog to learn more about metrics we've tried and the lessons learned from past rounds

  2. Fork one of the notebooks in our Insights Repo to start exploring the data.

  3. Check out our GitHub Project Board for the latest issues we need help with.

Support & Community​

We're building a network of Impact Data Scientists and want to support your contributions: