Greetings from FtC & Plurality Tokyo - Tokyo 2024

we're going to start with an opening talk from David Casey the director of funding the commons and then also Beth McCarthy the program director of funding the commons so uh yeah without further Ado I'll pass it off to them hi um thank you everyone for joining us today I just wanted to say a few words of gratitude toward um our uh partners that we've been coordinating this day with uh especially hero uh taka and shinya um from plurality Tokyo and Dai Tokyo it's been really a pleasure learning about um all that is going on in y'all's Community about um funding public goods thinking about philosophical approaches that have been really inspiring to us and yeah really looking forward to a day of um yeah Rich talks among people that uh are doing really important work so thank you guys thank you all right good morning everybody so I'm David and I will give you a bit of a brief history of funding the commons and how we got here today so funding the commons was incubated by a company called protocol Labs back in 2021 protocol Labs is the same team behind the filecoin blockchain network and ipfs the interplanetary file system system amongst other open- source public goods such as Li P top as well uh funding the commons has happened 10 times including uh two times virtually during covid and eight times physically in the real world uh the event has brought uh over 2,000 of you together around the world across Asia Europe and the Americas and uh we bring together Builders funders academics and uh increasingly the public sector national International and Municipal uh to discuss and develop and prototype new models in public goods funding so what is the focus of funding the commons we are building an incubation ecosystem for public goods funding infrastructure in other words we are looking at uh and partnering with developers Builders and protocol de protocol developing public goods funding infrastructure uh matching them with funders both philanthropic and Venture and looking at how we can create a flywheel effect of developers building the infrastructure and using that very same infrastructure to run funding through it to fund more developers uh we do this through a series of events hackathons residencies and conferences like this one here today as well as uh more and more funding experiments which I'll talk about in a little bit uh first I'll go through where we've been in the last couple of years so in 2023 our first Flagship event was in Paris at sorbon University uh we did a virtual hackathon fund public goods hackathon following that we ran a monthlong live work residency for open- Source public goods builders in Berlin and we ran funding the commons Berlin together with the D Berlin team so this is not the first time we're working together with the decentralized science Community actually in Paris as well in 2023 uh the dii team ran D Paris team ran a series of of workshops uh we worked with a team called deact in Istanbul uh to run a funding the commons popup mini event and our final event last year was funding the commons Ty uh which was together with the Dow zero crew which I saw here yesterday actually so looking forward into 2024 we started in the San Francisco Bay Area my hometown uh we ran our first Conference of this year uh just now in April uh we're here in Tokyo and our final conference of the year will be in Bangkok in November immediately preceding uh ethereum Devcon something that I'm really excited about this year is launching something called The Commons funds and the commons fund is something we were dreaming of back during my time at protocol Labs uh together with uh protocol Labs founder Juan Benet Evan mizono who used to run network Goods there which was the public goods team at protocol labs and the vision was to develop a fund uh to fund Builders of public goods funding infrastructure so finally we are starting to do that uh just went through the events uh the conferences so we'll also mention that we're running a hackathon later this year so stay tuned for that and there will be uh prizes and uh opportunities to connect with sponsors and mentors in the public goods funding space and we will run a month-long residency for builders in my Thailand so we're really excited about that applications have just opened you can talk to me or any of the other funding the common team members if you're interested in going to changai Thailand for a month and coming and building open source public goods alongside uh Builders developers designers from around the world and finally we'll close with funding the commons Bangkok uh aside from conferences we've also started doing popups this year which are essentially mini events or tracks within larger uh larger events we did one June already last month in Sonoma in California at Edge Esmeralda which is our uh Partners Edge City they do uh events around the world as well and we'll be joining them in Argentina next month for Edo um where there's a really interesting movement uh from the Grassroots all way to the public sector at the national level in Argentina for innovating in uh adoption of crypto to solve some of the uh very acute financial and monetary structural problems of that country so I mentioned the commons fund earlier this is what we're really excited about introducing to the world this year uh the commons fund is meant to fund and innovate and experiment with new blockchain based public goods funding infrastructure so we are a uh nonprofit uh philanthropic fund it's not Venture it's grants um it's open to Applications we'll also start running things like quadratic funding rounds um and other uh experimental funding distributions um and stay tuned about that we'll be publishing more information in the next few weeks and announcing our first uh grants um these are some ways you can get involved uh in our upcoming hackathons residencies at these conferences uh speaker applications are always open um volunteering we always need more volunteers um we're always looking for uh your generous Financial contributions and donations that allow this event to exist and uh we are open to uh ideas and uh Grant proposals if you're building open- Source public goods funding infrastructure uh come talk to us and thank you for being [Applause] here oh wait a little bit more so first we're going to thank our partners again plurality Tokyo [Applause] dii [Applause] Tokyo and fracton so thanks again I uh may have mentioned this before but I can't reiterate enough that this event could not have happened without our Japanese partners and we are indebted to them for uh for all of this in addition uh I wanted to thank all the sponsors that contributed financially and in other ways to making this event possible and to all the other organizations that contributed in various ways um to this community and really beautiful seeing the emergence of the funding the commons and public goods Community here in Japan so thank you [Applause] again awesome thank you so much David and Beth and uh can we give one more round of applause to the running the commons team and also I want to give it up for our translators too who have been able to allow everybody in this room uh to get the information and education here that we're giving today so let's give another round of applause thank you Beth thank you David thank you to the whole crew here um okay so next up I'd like to invite taka from plurality Tokyo to uh to Tokyo to give his opening and yeah pass it off to you taka all right all right so hey good morning everyone um I'm from prority Tokyo now prority Tokyo is one of the co co-organizer of the funding the commons uh in terms of day two it's mean like uh today I I'm in charge of the creating the program on the speaker Logistics so I'm very honored to uh opening conference like this so I let me introducing about um background philosophy award that day so I had a little bit experience with uh working with J government uh I was kind of the startup founder as a government technology services but as far as failure it's hard to making money as aition public goods then um I find kind of their isrm ecosystem they have a own currency like a Isa or op or something like that they have a mechanism of the taxation as a gas fee or smart contract so then for example like a isan foundation is trying to making the growing the ecosystem as kind of the nation or country imagine like U almost country has a own currency then and the own uh taxation system then that's could be making their Market as an ecosystem so I feel like a crypto ecosystem kind of the similar structure of the government or governance so that's the reason why I'm into the crypto industry right now um I'm are running the priority Tok Community which is trying to making the briding some of their Cutting Edge of their mechanism uh from their is ecosystem to the public sector or government something like that um I wish the maybe half people came from the Japanese and the half people came from the Foreigner so maybe you feel like some of the barrier as a rung Gage or uh like uh when they chatting you ask like hey what are you building so I feel like um actually what I'm building I'm not sure kind of so like kind of I wish to you guys feel like a frustration to making the communication or gathering like uh sharing your knowledgement I think that's okay because this is a your opportunity to are confusing to thinking to acing like that so I wish yeah you already skin the game like uh you PID the money for the participate the conference you pay that time to participate conference so don't be nervous about everything yeah so that's the my hope that's it thanks so much