Advancing the future of coordination and funding
The Coordination Layer
The systems we use to fund and govern shared resources—open-source software, digital public infrastructure, scientific research, even our planet—were built for a different era. They are slow, opaque, and often disconnected from the people closest to the problems. As AI reshapes how value is created and distributed, improving these systems is not optional.
We accelerate the development of coordination infrastructure for public goods: funding mechanisms, governance systems, and programmable tools that move capital and support shared resources.
The people working on this—across frontier labs, universities, government agencies, open-source communities, and protocol teams—are often addressing different parts of the same challenge without being in the same room. We bring them together and provide the tools, funding, and institutional connections to build in alignment.
The Context
The models are improving faster than the institutions that decide who benefits from them.
HUMAN WELFARE
Concentration is a stability problem. When gains concentrate faster than institutions adapt, the cost returns as political volatility, lost legitimacy, and pressure on the systems that produced the gains. AI compresses an adjustment window earlier transitions had decades to learn and adapt from.
HUMAN AGENCY
Sovereignty runs all the way down. Most conversations about sovereign AI focus on the nation-state. The version we care about runs all the way down to communities and people who can inspect, run, and govern the systems they live with. Sovereignty versus power concentration contain tradeoffs that must be measured and understood.
FUNDING & GOVERNANCE
Allocation is a design problem. Philanthropic capital from AI equity is about to become liquid. Existing machinery works, and it was built for a slower world. Whether it can move this much, this fast, and reach places existing pipelines never have is an open design problem. We have spent five years testing mechanisms to fund the commons of the 21st century.
Funding the Commons has convened this work since 2021: mechanism designers, the funders who will deploy this capital, and the institutions that have to run it. Either these systems get designed while the infrastructure is being built, or they get bolted on once the power has settled.
We Bring Together
[ Builders ]
Engineers, developers, and open-source maintainers creating funding tools, governance systems, allocation mechanisms, and coordination technology.
[ Researchers ]
Economists, mechanism designers, AI governance scholars, and social scientists studying how shared resources get funded and governed at scale.
[ Funders ]
Foundations, protocol treasuries, and institutional investors deploying capital for public benefit.
[ Policymakers ]
Government officials shaping rules, standards, and regulatory frameworks at every level—municipal, national, and international.
[ Civic Sector ]
Mission-driven organizations building public infrastructure—from internet freedom tools to refugee reunification platforms.
[ Multilateral Institutions ]
International bodies piloting new funding and governance systems in the field, from UNDP to UNICEF Office of Innovation to the World Bank.
Conferences
Every piece of the solution exists. The people holding them have never been in the same room.
Where policymakers, researchers, builders, and funders share the same room and the same problems.
Media Lab
Curious about public goods funding culture?
Interviews, analysis, and field dispatches from the people building coordination infrastructure for public goods. We capture what happens when researchers, policymakers, builders, and funders work on the same problems in the same room—and publish the ideas that come out of it.
Have something to contribute?
Notable Past Speakers
Audrey Tang
Taiwan's Former Minister of Digital Innovation
What I really like about the Funding the Commons community is that people openly talk about failures—talking about issues that are instrumental, things that really didn’t work right. And so, this particular venue, Funding the Commons, brings together not just the visionaries but also the actual engineers that can make such visions even more feasible for the future generations.
Al Smith
Tor Project
I started participating in Funding the Commons because I was looking for other ways to fund open-source software. We were running into these problems of sustainability at the Tor Project, and Funding the Commons was offering a completely new vision of what it looks like to fund something that's open and free.
Chris Szymczak
UNICEF Office of Innovation
I'm super excited about UNICEF’s relationship with Funding the Commons, and we see eye to eye when it comes to values and the things that we believe in. We see eye to eye thinking about technology in a positive way, that technology actually can do something for good.