Introducing Funding the Commons - Berkeley 2024

[Music] so my name is David and I'm the director of funding the commons uh to talk a little bit about funding the commons uh what we're doing Beyond just conferences so we we run conferences we run hackathons uh for open- Source public goods funding infrastructure and we run developer residencies so we ran one in Berlin last year with about 35 open source developers that lived together uh worked together ate together uh for a month and built some really interesting technology and we're going to keep running those residencies I'll talk more about our next one and really what we're doing as a at an ecosystem level is is bringing together uh the protocols the academic institutions the open source Builders uh the startups and really uh working together uh to create a cohesive um system for for building building supporting and funding uh the infrastructure that that funds public goods and that funds open source software developers so we ran three funding the commons conferences last year in Paris Berlin and taipe uh we ran a hackathon in August and we ran our uh open source developer residency as I mentioned so upstairs there's actually an entire uh other conference happening uh formerly it was called sustainable blockchain Summit also incubated by the protocol Labs Team filecoin Green and that is currently transforming into a new conference called Earth Commons that is under our purview um and that is yeah a little bit of context about the Earth Commons if there was any confusion um why there are two different conferences uh they're both being run by the same team um there is some overlap in terms of looking at um looking at Commons and public goods and how to manage them how to economically incentivize them uh and that one is yeah focused on climate and the the Great Commons that we all share together this planet uh so what is next what's in store for 2024 uh this is something that I haven't spoken about publicly yet we're uh you're hearing about it for the first time in this room so we're really excited about a use case for blockchain technology that I think is uh very kind of uh under appreciated and it's working directly with the most marginalized people in this world um internation stateless refugees and supporting them directly with things like a basic income um access to an identity for stateless persons and the uh ability to kind of access basic Financial Services um we think that blockchain can be extremely disruptive in this very specific uh use case and we're looking at uh deploying some of the public goods funding infrastructure uh the same infrastructure that's being used to fund open source and seeing how we can use it for Direct uh cash distributions to refugees around the world and um we're really excited about this it's it's something that we've kind of been running in stealth for a few months now and um just starting to to get the word out uh coming up for the rest of 2024 our next conference will be in Tokyo Japan on 2425 July that's right before the ethereum edcon uh we'll run our next developer residency in thailands that will be in October preceding uh the Devcon and we'll run our final conference of the year in Bangkok Thailand on the 8th and 9th of November which is right before the ethereum Devcon in Tokyo we are partnered with uh fracton and DOW zero so we have some great Community Partners there that we're excited to work together with and yeah so in terms of ways that you can get involved um talk to me if you're interested in participating in a hackathon in a residency in sponsoring any of our events um we have open speaker applications for our events so we're always open um especially if you have new research and we're also open to volunteers um we have a small grants program that we're building um we're just launching something that we call the Builder basic income fund together with drips um and we're supporting three Builders of open- source public goods funding infrastructure uh with a basic income through the drips protocol that that gets distributed uh by the second on chain and that's also an open uh fund that anyone else is welcome to to contribute to which again supports uh three three Builders currently that are building things that we think are cool um thank you optimism retr pgf for helping uh make our organization uh work and be funded that was a um surprise for us and we're grateful for receiving the funds and thank you to all the sponsors that made um both events upstairs and downstairs possible