Hi, Robert Hambrock (one of the proposers of #1667) here.

I reckon the following comments on the 3 most recently stated abstain/nay reasons from some members should be considered:

1. Pursue via fellowship / fellowship treasury

@W1ZSPR3 : I'd like to see this pursued via the fellowship or fellowship treasury

@Polkadot Music Events Initiative : This isn't something we feel should be a focus and should also be funded elsewhere / approved by a specific bounty.

Please both see in particular answer 4. in the FAQ shared at the top of our referendum post: https://hackmd.io/@MerkleMountainBelts/FAQ

For other funding sources, please note that W3F has not issued any OpenGrants for more than $100k in the last two years. When we reached out to W3F a year ago, they directed us to treasury, see our reply to ChaosDAO's comment on our prior ref (comment below https://polkadot.subsquare.io/referenda/1317#2).

As an aside: We also believe that OpenGov should certainly support core R&D as a general strategy – this is too important to be kept centralized, dependent on the budget and policies of a single institution.

With respect to the bounty suggestion by @Polkadot Music Events Initiative : there is no bounty active at the moment for research work, and to my knowledge, there has never been one, and none are planned.

2. Wait for "missing" signal from technical fellowship

@The Ionian : I agree with the fellow members to wait for some signal from the technical fellowship before casting a final vote.

We wrote to Permanence's public Telegram channel about this exact topic before your vote.
In case you missed that: three technical fellowship members have voted aye and left supportive comments on the proposal, and specifically they are the three most qualified to assess the proposal given they directly work on bridges:

1. Clara (Snowfork engineer & TF member),
2. Seun (Hyperbridge lead & TF member), and
3. Adrian (Parity bridge team lead & TF member)

Note also that two W3F researchers (Alistair and Andrew) have left supportive comments on the ref, and JAM Implementers DAO switched to Aye on the ref.

This update is directly related to the stated abstain/nay reasons of most other members.
I kindly ask Permanence DAO members to reconsider their voting positions based on the above updates.
Thank you for your attention.

Thanks - can you explain why the technical fellowship wouldn't fund this from their treasury? I may have missed it but in the link you posted, it just states that you thought it would be a fit for the technical fellowship treasury to fund it and they declined, but I didn't see any reason or link to a discussion of why.

Hey @W1ZSPR3 , thanks for following up on this.

Thanks - can you explain why the technical fellowship wouldn't fund this from their treasury? I may have missed it but in the link you posted, it just states that you thought it would be a fit for the technical fellowship treasury to fund it and they declined, but I didn't see any reason or link to a discussion of why.

From the FAQ post:

We did reach out to the Fellowship for funding almost a year ago (prior to the original referendum), but were informed that our work's nature was out of scope for funding by Fellowship. And to our knowledge, the Fellowship has not funded any research papers to date.

To add detail to this: We were in email contact with technical fellowship's secretariate, and they informed us that the technical fellowship deemed our proposal out of scope for funding by them, since the scope for technical projects would be limited to what the fellowship collective needs internally. An example of tooling that helps fellowship's day-to-day needs is https://collectives.subsquare.io/posts/18, i.e. the work of Bryan Chen (fellowship member) on ecosystem test environments.

For external confirmation of this, you can check out the related discussion on AAG #193, and the clarification of the technical fellowship on the scope of their treasury on OpenDev call July 2024 (both links directly to related sections of the calls).