Funding the
Commons

Introduction and overview of Funding the Commons Day 1

The talk highlights parallels and differences between reward-based crowdfunding (e.g Kickstarter) and the subset of cryptotokens that also involve preselling a future product, service or marketplace (e.g. utility tokens). The talk will emphasise the role of uncertainty, learning, moral hazard and contractual features which help to overcome the misalignment of incentives.

Join author, Puja Ohlhaver, with contributors Leon Erichsen and Divya Siddarth for an open Q&A about Decentralized Society.

Creating value-driven economies, defining ideal market incentives, the gaps we need to close and the tools we need to align actions with the outcomes we seek to see in the world. Any new technology will be ultimately subject to the values encoded within the system it operates on.

The Protocol Guild is a new Public Goods funding organization exclusively focused on the core Ethereum protocol: a collective that maintains an onchain registry of its membership.

As one of the first DAOs in decentralized science (DeSci), we at VitaDAO spent the last year onboarding contributors and making sure that the DAO works for them. From voting modalities to private key management to convincing our Discord bot that you’re a real human, a lot of details required and still require improvement. The biggest challenge, however, is to constantly remind ourselves not to take technology as a given, but to define from first principles what a DAO should look like to optimally enable our community to solve the problem of funding longevity research.

LabDAO is an open, community-run network of wet & dry laboratory services to advance progress in the life sciences. By bringing together open scientific tools, teams and initial funding we want to build a home for inventors online.

Unitary Fund is a non-profit that supports public goods funding in quantum technologies: quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum networks. We do three main things (1) run a microgrant program that has funded 50+ projects across 20+ countries (2) run an in house open source lab and (3) host the largest community of open source developers in the space. This talk will share our experience as a case study in public goods funding for deep tech. We will share what has and has not worked and discuss future directions.

Software provides structure and thus relative predictability for our online interactions. “Code is law” lends a sense of absoluteness to the specific procedures or incentives embedded in the software. I prefer “Algorithms as Policy” because it is commonly understood that policies may evolve in time in response to change in context. This talk explore the GitcoinDAO’s data science work on fraud detection from an Algorithms as Policy perspective with attention to the costs incurred, value created, and open questions about funding this ongoing work.

For the past three years, we have been building a synthetic biology community focused on tackling the biggest problems and opportunities in the face a changing climate. Now, drawing from gold standards of modern funding systems, we will share our design of a new support mechanism to initiate new, "big if true" projects that can fulfill biotechs potential impact to planetary health, ecosystem health and future infrastructure.

Silicon Valley is full of for-profit founders who charismatically launch thousands of new efforts every year. Can we bring dynamism to the creation of public goods?

James Sinka will explain how IP-NFTs are changing the way scientist can mint their discoveries to own some of the upside of their work. Furthermore, crowdsourcing enables bigger problems to be tackled, and lets outside funders enjoy in the spoils of the scientific innovations developed!

The talk explores AlphaBonds’ use of Risk-adjusted Bonding Curves for financing real world outcomes with adaptive feedback loops.

Distinctions between private, public, and common goods have always been blurred; technology only makes them more so. Providing the positive-sum rails necessary for collective progress (from research to information common to digital infrastructure like identity) requires both distinguishing between types of goods and appropriate provision, and remixing existing decision-making structures to maximize the collective good. In this talk, we discuss the history of boundaries between goods and providers, and lay out possibilities for the future.

Workshop

Introduction and overview of Funding the Commons Day 2

Democratic mechanisms -- standard voting, participatory budgeting, deliberative mechanisms, crowdsourcing -- seek to produce outcomes that "fairly" represent those who participated in the process, for some notion of "fair." However, a constant empirical fact across contexts is that voting population is unrepresentative of the "true" population. I detail resulting challenges and recent work to address them, including my own work in crowdsourcing ("311 systems) participation

The Foresight Institute is building a living technology tree for collaborative mapping of knowledge, technologies, and open problems in the intelligent cooperation space. This talk showcases the visualisation software and data structures underlying the tech tree; the iterative process of building with collaborators; and the current prototype of the tree. We will also examine new ideas and theses that have emerged from mapping out relationships in the tree. Finally, we will discuss future use cases for the tech tree, including bounties and problem discovery.

Mark Miller (Agoric) is joined by Christine Peterson & Allison Duettmann of Foresight institute and Juan Benet (Protocol Labs) to map out how we can set up the right systems and actions to move ourselves towards a paretotopian future

Unfortunately, popular books on blockchains contain a lot of information that just isn nott true. For instance, they tell the reader that blockchains like Bitcoin use encryption, that blockchains (by preventing double-spends) can guarantee the uniqueness of assets generally, and that decentralization is what prevents tampering with blockchain records. But we really need the general public to understand the basics of blockchain technology, for a few reasons: 1) the better they understand, the less likely they are to fall for scams, and 2) the better they understand, the more empowered they are to innovate and create new businesses and communities using their specialized non-blockchain knowledge. But this is a public goods problem, because it takes a significant amount of effort to educate, and educational efforts are subject to free-riding by competitor companies. However, I do not think the issue is insurmountable. We can incentivize knowledge in the general public by creating concrete, useful products that use individual "pieces" of blockchain technology, such as hashes, digital signatures, and tamper-evidence logs. When people get experience using these concrete products that help them in their everyday lives, they are much more likely to understand (and to want to understand) blockchains as a whole. I can explain what I have been building, and how I think other people can build similar concrete products.

Artizen’s mission is to radically expand support for the visionaries and problem-solvers who are building the world we want to live in. We do this with a transparent and participatory grant model that allows donors to directly support their values, with additional support for the grants that do the most good for the most people. In this talk, we will present a flexible model for public goods funding as well as an application of this model to the design of a continuous match funding mechanism for Artizen Grants.

Open-source projects differ from private companies, because their product is a public good. On the other hand, open-source projects are very similar to private companies with respect to how they build their products. Both must manage their runway and make decisions in the face of persistent uncertainty in the surrounding environment. Unlike private companies, open-source projects lack flexible mechanisms for managing financing and risk. We highlight this problem and showcase strawman solutions, aiming to motivate critical attention to this gap.

Overview of the history, challenges, and opportunities for peer review

What we can learn from the standardization movements of the early 1900s.

Web3 today sits on a knife’s edge where developers increasingly have to decide whether to include off-chain user data into their products. "Can I take on an email or phone number? Do I build UX beyond a users wallet and on-chain data? How can we juggle privacy needs with the promise of interoperability web3 brings us? What can we learn from web2 privacy and what tools make web3 uniquely exciting in avoiding a privacy commons tragedy?

Work is underway by major space agencies and commercial operators to establish networking around the Moon. These lunar networks will underpin human and robotic exploration, and eventually socio-political activities. This talk will introduce the requirement and conditions for networks around the Moon, and specific opportunities to think anew about foundational questions of architecture and design. I will also discuss why this is an important moment to avoid "splinternets" between geopolitical rivals, and ensure lunar networking is established and protected as a commons—much like space itself.

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