FIL-RetroPGF Round 2 - Onerous Gatekeeping

[anjor]

I was recently pulled into a private telegram chat by people running the retro-pgf because there were 3 similar applications having to do with archiving of solana ledger. The organisers then suggested that it would be difficult for badgeholders to assess across the 3 applications and transferred the responsibility of disambiguation on to the applicants.

Interestingly, the 3 applicants in question are all "insiders" so to speak - 1) Molly, 2) A leading SP in the filecoin ecosystem, and 3) a former PL employee.

In my opinion:

1. The organisers should give badge holders a bit more credit and not unnecessarily gatekeep. Filecoin is a complex system. Even merely onboarding data to filecoin is a highly complicated task involving multiple different parts. Given that badge holders are supposed to have some experience of the ecosystem, I would expect them to be aware of this already.
2. The gatekeeping, especially with "insiders" (at different levels of being inside) being involved actually gives the impression of diverting funds in a partial and biased way as opposed to impartial impact-based funding.
3. These discussions should be done in public and not in private telegram channels.

For the specific application disambiguation I have opened a separate discussion - #721