Extend and decentralize a portion of the Incentive Fund for community-led allocation

Hey Venice team — quick emergent idea from the depths of discord that could seriously accelerate the velocity of the whole ecosystem.

• Why this helps

  • Ship faster: small, fast grants let contributors try things without ceremony.

  • Iterate smarter: community allocates to what’s working, in real time.

  • Build ownership: people who help build Venice also steer where resources go.

  • Network effects: more experiments → more surface area → more users/devs → stronger feedback loops.

The ask

• Extend the Incentive Fund and carve out a recurring community-allocated pool that the Venice.ai community can deploy autonomously (with lightweight guardrails).

• Keep it scrappy and high-trust: fund small, fast experiments first; scale what shows traction.

How it could work (simple, pragmatic)

• Scope: recurring micro-grants and retroactive rewards for:

  • Infra/tools, SDKs, evals/benchmarks, prompts/agents, docs/tutorials, community ops, creative showcases.

• Process:

  • Proposals posted on the Venice Featurebase board with a short “why now / what to ship in 2 weeks” brief.

  • Community signal via upvotes or lightweight QV; a small steward circle (rotating) executes payouts weekly.

  • Retroactive rewards for shipped, measurable impact (usage, PRs merged, eval wins).

• Guardrails:

  • Clear monthly cap, public ledger of grants, conflict-of-interest disclosure.

  • Sunsetting rules for stale proposals; “show, don’t tell” bias (demos > decks).

• Pilot:

  • 90-day pilot with a fixed budget; weekly grants cadence; month-1 review, then expand or adjust.

Why this benefits Venice (as a platform)

• Lowers PM bandwidth: community triages and funds what they need most.

• Increases throughput: more hands building core extensions and examples that reduce support surface.

• Strengthens product signal: funded work becomes immediate UX and model feedback.

• Compounds community trust: people who contribute feel real ownership, which attracts more builders.

Success metrics (clear, simple)

• Time-to-fund (proposal → grant → shipped demo).

• Number of funded experiments that ship.

• Retention of funded contributors (repeat shippers).

• Usage/impact: eval wins, SDK downloads, bots shipped, DAU on community projects.

• Qualitative delight: “this unblocked me” moments captured in post-grant notes.

This is a great place to coordinate and track this work: right here, the Venice Featurebase board for inspiration and prioritization flow.

Happy to help draft the pilot rubric and steward rotation.

Also happy to show you what we (the community) have built.

@agentic_alpha