Grantee Exposé Lightning Talk 1 - Sustaining Open Source Software GITCOIN by Dan Lipert (Devcon5)

my name is Dan Lippert I'm the VP of engineering at get coin and today I'm gonna talk about sustaining open source software so what do we do at git coin we try to sustain the open source community and one of the ways we've done that is earlier this year we launched our grants project and what grants basically is it's like patreon but for open source software basically you get recurring revenue for your project and why that's special is if you're an open source developer maybe every once in a while you get a donation of one thousand or five thousand dollars at a time and that's really great but what's actually better is if you can count on a recurring amount of donations every month and so we built that project using AI p133 7 which is a subscriptions model on ethereum using meta transactions and so basically if you were to donate say 100 die to a project instead of just sending that 100 die what you can do is use our tap go in select that you want to donate 10 die for 10 months and then you simply do a signature that gets sent to our back-end and then we mind those transactions for you every month using meta transactions so it's a really great way to not just get money but have money that you can count on and as an open source developer that's really great because it's it's almost like having a day job right it's almost like working for some company or some startup where you have that guaranteed paycheck every month one thing that we added on this year is capital constrained liberal radicalism and what is that basically it's a way that we can match funds from big donors to our grant recipients and there's a lot of different ways that you can do that but basically you can think of two models and clr is somewhere in between you can think of the the model of $1 one though right so someone donates $1 and then we match that with $1 or $10 or $100 right or you can think of one person one vote so one person makes a donation be that $1 be that $1,000 and then we match that with some predetermined fund say $1,000 well what clr does is it's actually in between it counts the fact that $1 is not the same to every person right but you do want to have that skin in the game so you do want to count the amount of the donation that was made and so clr is a really nice balance between that of course it was created by metallic Glen while andso hit sig definitely check out the paper see the eath research forums if you want to know more about how CLR works it's a really cool economic model and it's worked out really well for us so you can see here here's like a demonstration of how the funding model actually works so you've got loops you've got an amount here say 275 dollars and then we match that with another 275 dollars but that's it that's just one contributor making one donation of $275 if that $275 comes from two people that's a really good signal right that means more people are interested in this project so we match it with even more funds even though it's the same amount $275 if you go all the way to the right here if 10 people combined donate 275 dollars that's like each person right that's all combined that's each person donating like 27 dollars that's a really amazing signal that this project means something to the community and so we match it with even more funds and so that's that's kind of the idea behind CLR it's it's not how much you donate its we're trying to figure out how much people care about a project using their donations as a signal so our first round early this year 2019 we had $25,000 in our open-source sustainability fund and we fielded $13,000 via 132 contributions here was the kind of the winners or the the highest ranking projects on our platform prismatic labs Molock Dow you know a lot of great projects here III is one of my personal favorites then we went on to round two and of course each time we want to make it even bigger so we had $50,000 and our OSS fund this time we fielded fifty six thousand dollars from 214 unique contributions and here are the projects that did well that round of course the prog pal technical audit hopper decentralized privacy-preserving something plasma group wallet connect you to swap Moloch down so another successful round and round three we had $100,000 so what were the results before I get into that actually I want to talk about something that we launched on the platform that was new for this round which is real-time estimations of how much your contribution will affect the project how much matching funds you'll get as you're making the donation so you can see here when we have a hundred thousand dollars in matching funds your donation can make an absolutely huge difference with clr for this project if you were to donate one die we would have matched it with 115 . if you were to donate ten die that would have been two hundred and seventy-four die and so you can see as the amount of your donation goes up you know we don't donate we don't match it linearly it kind of curves off at the end but like I said before the important thing is that we know that this person cares about this project you know we're using your donation as data to match our funds so so it was a really successful round people were really excited that they were able to see that hey I can donate $1 and it actually gives over a hundred dollars to this project so here's just some folks from our community I gave one die to six projects on get coin today and here we're here were the matches for each project for Austin Griffith 81 died for ethers yes eighty nine died for fuzzing 126 thigh so you know six dollars generated hundreds and hundreds of dollars in matching funds over here we have ten digging some died out of this couch so to speak and you know chucking in one die to to make a big difference to these different projects and these open-source developers and then another person four dollars into six hundred and forty five dollars here we see vitalik excited about our grant clr around three Hudson Jameson as well contributing Tendai to five projects and you know we're really excited when we see this type of community engagement because we feel like for too long there's been this idea in the community that there are these individual people who have a ton of ether and you can go to them on Twitter you've got to network with people you've got to find them you got to have that connection with them and then they'll give you tens of thousands of dollars for your project right and so it's very centralized right we have these individual nodes that control the funding or so people think but actually that's not true you know as a community we have hundreds thousands tens of thousands of people who are interested in open source software interested in the theorem and we want their attention and we want their input as to where these funds should go you know what projects are worthwhile for the community you don't need to have thousands of ether to help us determine which projects are needed and so that was kind of our goal with CLR that's the goal behind our open-source sustainability fund and so the round 3 results hundred thousand dollars in matching funds and 170 thousand across two thousand two hundred and sixteen unique contributions the Elite Eight Lighthouse Austin Griffith eath hub our die prism Viper the gas stations Network and ethers je s so congratulations to the winners of our latest clr round we're excited for the next round our goal is to raise 150 thousand dollars for our open source sustainability fund if you want to contribute reach out to me reach out to Kevin Walker reach out to Aditya any of the get coin team members and we'll let you know how you can help out and finally I just want to ask what would the world look like if open source was sustainable what would it look like if the people who build these tools to get paid for it and have a guaranteed paycheck every month thank you [Applause]