Funding the Commons
Nov 12 2021

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Funding the Commons is a virtual summit for individuals and organizations building new models of sustainable public goods funding and value alignment in open source networks.
Join Juan Benet (Protocol Labs), Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Karl Floersch (Optimism), and other thought leaders to discuss novel experiments and future directions for funding our collective commons.

Schedule
Intro: Closing The Innovation Chasm
Overview of the history and importance of public goods funding, and why new approaches are critical to pushing technological process forward

Funding public goods — algorithms and mechanisms
A view of the latest thinking around novel public funding experiments and exciting new projects in the ecosystem

Quadratic funding on Gitcoin
A history of quadratic funding on one of the most mature public funding platforms in Web3

Networked OKRs & Milestone Bounties
Protocol Lab's approach to aligning and funding ecosystem progress in a more decentralized fashion

Impact certificates and Impact Markets
The benefits of markets in altruistic impact, and what's needed to achieve them

Story of a network-funded team
How Prysmatic Labs developed Prysm and other public goods using new funding mechanisms

How can public goods be profitable?
Miles (a16z General Counsel, Crypto) and Marta (Protocol Labs General Counsel) discuss the challenges and opportunities of creating sustainable, profitable public goods projects
Retroactive Public Goods Funding Experiment 1
Discussing the mechanisms, results and learnings of Optimism's first retroactive public goods award

S-process funding
Introducing the S-process, an algorithm that enables multiple funders to simultaneously delegate the optimization of funding decisions to overlapping groups of trusted advisors. This also allows the advisors to debate and coordinate in deciding the total amount of funding any particular project should receive

Impact Evaluators
Retroactive public goods funding for the broader Protocol Labs network

Beyond Philanthropy: Memetic Altruism and Future Prizes
Incentives for funding public goods at scale

Data Commons for Public Good
Building a data economy to enable more responsible use of data, in order to maximize social welfare and economic efficiency while protecting users' data rights and enabling fair distribution of value

Speakers