17. Tools for Public Goods Ecosystem Building - Taipei 2023

[Music] okay thank you first of all I have to say that s is a very hard worker she just run here from Shu from from participating in gzero hackathon how how was it uh I didn't know it's uh it was one hour away I took a cab without knowing where I was going and it actually took me two hours so finally I made it it was great it was great amazing people and probably a lot of them are going to come tomorrow here yeah glad to have you here um I I would um start from from maybe everybody can introduce yourself a little bit talking about why you're here talking about public goods ecosystems and stuff your experience uh why don't we start from maybe SEL as well yes um first of all thank you so much for having me here I am say and I started my journey in public goods space through green pill Network green pill network is a community built around the green pill podcast which was started by Kevin auki and uh through that I then recently joined gitcoin because a lot of work that we were doing at green pill Network sort of um aligns with gitcoin and we think ourselves as the local arm of gitcoin where we want to translate and everything that is that gitcoin is doing how is that uh you know how that can actually be useful to local people so uh yeah that that's pretty much my introduction in the space and that's what I do yeah awesome Jimmy um okay hi everyone Jimmy from fbd I'm the contributor layer and what fbal do like I se like Frank already described and since suggest here I think FB Community is the one which like impact like G poo like IDE here in Taiwan yes that's it I love Fab awesome hey folks Abby here um so I have a long I guess uh story into how I got into this I'll just be as concise as possible I think e Denver um 2019 I grabbed 7-Eleven pizzas with Kevin auki and he just got me really excited about the space and that was pre zerion then um long story short I I'm the product lead as my day job at zerion we're building you know web wallet but we're also building out apis for other companies like Unis swap um gitcoin passport as well has been a big uh I guess partner of ours in like you know helping uh both amplify the product as well as the apis so like if you use Unis swap or rainbow wallet a lot of their um transactions portfolio history all of that is also built on zerion infrastructure so I do that as my day job but then um we also incubated Hydra Ventures and social graph Ventures so Hydra Ventures is how I'm most closely affiliated with with um the whole um I'd say like public good space because we incubated um investment Dows like beaker Dow that invest into other D side Dows like V da um you know molecule and whatnot so like for us um our Focus has been let's grow the GDP of um you know both open source as well as public goods um uh projects and let's almost like bring in LPS and other you know fun of funds that are interested in the space um more from a value added perspective and just you know make and incubate other DS so that's been the latest but also um me David and a few others here we were at zalu recently so that was the network state that happened in turkey and then before that in Montenegro so that was awesome just with Clan and metallic and everyone else kind of you know figuring out where the space goes next especially in dii um so that was like the kind of latest involvement of mine that that's amazing because you're coming from the application angle and the Venture angle into the public space system just one quick question just just popped up what where where does the money come from for for the for for for for example social CFT Ventures where what what are their intentions that putting money into a public space ecosystem great question I mean it's really just operators and like people who are involved like in the space for example for Hydra Ventures the biggest uh LPS were this group of angels called de delis theis is like a very um highly involved you know VC fund we had a 1kx 1K is one of the other funds but then honestly for funds like social graph it was just stany from you know lens and a or like the forecaster ecosystem or like cyber connect ecosystem a lot of the social graph companies that are building in the space their Founders and employees from their teams were the largest checks into the fund because they also want to be involved in like the you know day-to-day operations they want to bring in deals um and for Hydra Ventures recently what we did is we did this request for Dows essentially we believe that if if you have an idea for you know a dow an investment Dow that you want to create say in account abstraction or say in like you know climate Finance right you should be able to spin that Dow up and we help you with all the legal with all the regulatory whatever kind of bottlenecks you might get so like a lot of the people that we've onboarded for investing are very much like lawyers investors Founders in this space yeah people who really want to see changes in the space I would say yeah um I'm going understand that our session is mostly about tooling but I want to start from a a higher level thing what what do you guys think is uh a vibrant public space ecosystem public goods ecosystem and what do you guys maybe you guys already have an example in mind or which is your own ecosystem that may be so and what what what what are the necessary steps to build a vibrant public goods ecosystem in your opinion I was start from s again yes um I definitely think that first and foremost uh the most important thing for any ecosystem is to Define what public goods mean to them or what you know what are the public goods for that ecosystem and um then to make it vibrant I think definitely uh Community right uh a strong sense of community where people are supporting each other and you know they sort of um understand that what this means to them uh yeah I think uh even if like there are few things that an ecosystem has that it can make a vibrant public goods ecosystem and definitely I feel like there's a lot of work happening around impact measurement and you know defining the uh you know the projects the impact they have um yeah some sort of accountability I think these are very uh minimum uh things that are required for any ecosystem to make it vibrant without getting into a lot of complexity yeah that that is very interesting I'll follow up with one question first uh because you talked about Community you talk about a sense of um either belonging or sense of Interest that's uh shared commonly um how how do you because for example uh gitcoin has a pretty loose boundary I would say because there are a lot of different projects with how do you define the boundaries of such a such a community of such interest or or what or at what level how how how loose or tight should we Define the boundaries for the interest to be concrete and for the funding to come in and for what what what would be your suggestion on that great question so gitcoin has two parts to it like Kevin always says there is one part which is credibly neutral right which is Grand stack which is the hello protocol and there is other part which are different programs right so each program for example eth infrastructure open source Community round or web3 community and education there's climate round there is Latin America around right so each program they it it has its own Community right so people they have their uh in each program they are active and they sort of like support each other so I think it kind of they have their own values right so it's sort of self-defining it becomes self-defining when people start identifying themselves with these projects or programs right so I think that is does that answer your question that is actually very very straightforward because uh because gcoin has become a platform for people to use people bring their own communities and funing sources and all that and use the tool as a platform for for people to to gather interest basically yes exactly uh that is why I think it's this is this is sort of narrative we are uh you know pushing and we want people to sort of think about uh like it has two parts right so people sort of sometimes confuse this but program it has its values it has you know a lot of humanness in it whereas the protocol side of thing is incredibly neutral right which doesn't surely involve any sort of Valu it's very inclusive and accessible anybody irrespective of where they come from what they do anything they can you know use it yeah of course makes all sense uh how about you Jimmy what what do you think is a Vibrant Community what what's your experience with that so I'm totally agree with like SEL like uh for the ecosystem is all about people it's all about like member all about the community and it's not really about like a donation value like under certain like institution like or mechanism it's not really about that it's about people and to build the vibrant like ecosystem we need the people who like really passion and like because like everyone need to have the sense of like honor and want to put their effort like into this community and for example like we can have the funing uh funing compy here in taipe like it's a really good like indicator that we do have the good Community here in taipe how what what do you think is necessary for people to have um interest or or to build this community what are necessary steps or necessary Milestones that you have to build especially for public goods space I think you should you should do the you should have the passion to like brainwash like someone brainwash yeah exactly like it's like a like religion you know here like a like nonprofit like stupid stuff like you need to like talking and talking and provide some material like reading like to to that everyone like understand like people are kind of um Associated like into this topic and people will change like they like mind somehow still comes back to people comes back to core Mission I guess yeah yeah yeah exactly AB how about you yeah I mean I'll just follow up on some of the points you asked for Milestones right I feel like one interesting Milestone usually is like can this community be self- sustaining even Beyond its initial founding or core organizations or members kind of you know pushing it forward and we saw this happen maybe last cycle with a lot of the refi space right like with refi you had a few players fad da tuon all these companies that came up gitcoin and a lot of the other I'd say like kernel and you know public goods Network and a lot of the other precursors to what we have now they really prop these networks up and now you know we we have a different landscape within the refi space so I think that's one Milestone but coming back to what makes I guess you know public goods funding and companies and organizations really work um you can go into an example say you know within the longevity space you have maybe VA da and you have a lot of the other Dows building in the space they usually have almost cult-like members right who are like really passionate about what they're doing kind of following up on your point but they also have on the other side like you know liquidity providers whether it's with giton or it's you know other investors whether it's Brian Johnson whoever it could be right really also passionate about bringing these networks of people um to bring their ideas to fruition and a lot of times now you're seeing you know for example with them they're having this uh Network State called Italia coming up in January and February where they're hosting that in the city called prospera in an island in Honduras like they also have some sort of a event or some sort of like a it could be an online community an inperson event but they usually have that's that's I feel like the final Milestone to say that you know hey like we've gone from like a group of individuals in a Discord kind of discussing our idea and putting it up in a you know getcoin grants program to like hey we now have like the whole ecosystem of Outsiders also interested in this space so they have now invited you know web three people AI people other researchers other researchers to come and contribute right so I feel like those are all probably characteristics you'd expect at the later stage of of you know well established public goods Network yeah it's super interesting that because we're talking about tools but here the most important pillar is still the people it's still the community right what and how what are the biggest challenges for example in let's say that the community all have a very strong core Mission and and and a vision where they want want to go and people share very similar mindsets let's say we already have that what are the biggest challenges to such communities AB do you want to start sure I mean tooling is only as helpful as like the actual like governance the actual values the mission that you've kind of set up for your You Know da or organization right so i' say like a lot of the tooling that exists at least now tries to solve for problems that don't exist yet right um and when I say tooling I really just mean like hey like we're like you know some sort of like a coordinat tool that's trying to make your job easier I feel like a lot of this can just be done you know as a subow or as you know just a smaller group of people making decisions on behalf of like the rest of the organization as long as they have a shared interest um so I'd say like the biggest tool that everyone really needs to use is more platforms like good coin um and kind of like like this this frenzy this positive kind of frenzy that you see with every um gitcoin grants round I think that's really the biggest value ad like trying to see who are other people in your same space trying to build similar complimentary Solutions forming you know helpful communities and groups around you a lot of the tooling that you need for that is just tooling that exists already whether it's communication platforms or you know whatnot so I'd leave it to them to maybe um answer more on like kind of what tooling they use on day-to-day basis yeah totally I'm confused the question here is about the biggest challenging or uh the the the challenge the challenges you would face to sustain a community somehow the challenges come from the people like uh B number like when when the the community grow bigger and people get like conflex like always as always and we can ACC this to the previous talk by meshin like we have the Godlike technology but like the middle like like a middle age like mindset and like emotion stuff right what what what what would be a very specific challenge that for Fab doll that happen in the past and you you basically how did you solve it um like sorry I'm going off script no wor no worry um like everything is challenged like uh we solve it like in a very centralized way like we call FB is D Dao but we are not decentralized we are not autonomous we are not even an organization like we are like antida to to be honest so whenever is like we we're kind of like interest group like to be honest understood yeah um I can talk about a recent experiment that we did at green pill Network and then we realized what went wrong with with the whole thing so uh the experiment was essentially we folked the grand stack version and we integrated hypers search in it so and we ran a grand round so when you see an application or a grand you will also see the hypers displayed of that grand basically the chapter green pill has different chapters green pill India green pill China green pill um you know Spain different different chapters so each of them had a grant and with a hypers Sears but uh when the round actually started so our hypothesis was that people who will support these projects will look at the hypers and depending on that they will make the decision whether they want to support this or not right um but when we actually saw the results it went very different so we realized like people did not really look at the hypers Sears they just went ahead and supported let's say I am from Greenville Japan and I have asked my community to support me they just supported me without really bothering about the hypers Sears displayed there right uh and that is not because they don't care that is also because they maybe they don't really understand the importance of it they don't really understand how to actually evaluate or see right uh so this is a you know this is a challenge right which means the whole thing is not very intuitive it's not something that you know people easily understand and we were actually you know um discussing this in the community one of the community members gave such a good uh you know solution like a potential solution so she suggested that when people look at the grants how about the grant with the most hypers Sears is dark green right the color changes with the number of hypers Sears right which sort of becomes a little easy for me or anybody as a donor or supporter who comes and who wants to see which project they want to support and they just have to look at the color and the color which is the darkest is the one has the highest number of hypers certs it's just a little difference and you know that just didn't click right so I believe that anything when we think about these tools uh I'm someone who works a lot with people who are local and not very technical because I am not very technical I feel like anything which is intuitive and you know sort of um uh is yeah it it has to be intuitive we can't really uh we can't really assume that people will understand this right so yeah this has been my recent experience with something that did not work to I think one thing you are you're talking about is also Sol let the demand also Sol let the need to emerge from the community and then apply some something to that and so my follow-up question to that will be how do you observe such demand how do you obser observe how do you keep keep yourself on the poles on top of the what the community meets how do you observe that um any anyone can sure I can I can jump in I mean there's two perspectives here from the product perspective like this is more maybe with Zion's Community right like we have ambassadors or we have people kind of like what Z was saying like like there's a lot of different like Alpha signals that you could you know create yourself you could have the coolest dashboards but of times often times it's qualitative data that's the hardest to actually like obtain so this could be just like you know through Community calls whatever kind of uh you know metrics and events you'd want to have but this is I guess on the product level right like kind of how you want to obtain information on how people are using your product or you know interacting within your community um I think within the Venture Dow side what we've done is we just have options grants every month based on your contributions right so within Hydra Ventures it's not it's not just about bringing deals but also like if you're lion with a certain Dow and you're helping that Dow you know with introductions with you know creating content with whatever you want to do we're able to see in a simple spreadsheet here's everyone's contributions and this is a dow this is really 300 people who have full-time jobs on other things they're working on right so their contributions will change month to month um a system like that was very hard for us to set up like we have a very complicated spreadsheet with like how do you decide what's valuable and what's not what's worth more shares and what's worth less it was very contentious we had a lot of weekly meetings where we'd you know get together and fully scrap the idea and start from scratch but now we've arrived at a I guess at like a decently kind of like a model that works we ported that model over to social graic Ventures as well and really the model incentivizes at the first one year of the fund's life cycle fund has a life cycle of four or five years you really have a higher incentive to contribute because the amount of options you can get is also higher like we've kind of had to gamify this whole system right so I think the the answer for that is just being make it easy to monitor in one place kind of what everyone's contributed don't delve too much into the details just have a higher level picture so depending on the kind of problem you're trying to solve it could look like my first answer or it could look like the second solution yeah I think that's super interesting that also encouraged people to pay attention to the right places right instead of just closing the door building your own thing you know that yeah because you want to avoid any duplication of efforts and DS you want to aoid you know people just all doing the same thing and thinking they're providing value but not really so yeah like you said spot on just trying to make sure we're able to delegate but not like you know micromanage yeah Jimmy do you have thoughts on this I'm totally agree with you like uh we are not like really use any like web three tools within the web we Tech the idea from the uh DZ like or G gz V like uh whatever like want to put effort and they do have the authority understood I I have a I do have a very specific question for for C uh but I hope it's not too sensitive because I I understand gitcoin recently because they ran around with shell and there was a lot of um controversies on that front so there are a lot of like communities discussions controversies and and how how does that given that we're talking about the core of uh put sustaining a dow or or public uh Goods space is about the communities how how do you guys face such a challenge thanks for asking asking that no problem yeah but definitely just also want to share that I've recently joined gitcoin so you know a lot of things have happened uh when I was not there but one of the things that I've been learning and knowing the way kit coin people are sort of um you know defining uh everything like I mentioned already there are two parts to it one is you know a part which is credibly neutral which is the platform right which is the protocol so anybody can run the round irrespective of what it is right that is something that is not going to be defined by gitcoin because it's a credibly neutral platform whereas the programs uh it is uh yeah that's a separate part that is where the whole you know values and everything comes in and there's one of the posts that I can you know share later if everyone is interested they can see at the gitcoin GU Forum which Kevin has posted where he talks about modularizing the program which essentially means that they will be like independent programs right because it's it's that particular community that can Define their values and everything for that program and gitcoin is just the platform they will use right so it has to be the balance but that is essentially how they probably are tackling if I can say or that's how probably we are moving right so it has to be different right so yeah I don't know if that answers but yeah that that's a very good answer thank you so much um so I I think the another question I do want to ask you guys because we're still talking about toolings um what's the one tool that's the most important for you for your public goods ecosystem that you can think of if you have to pick one and and of course why why why is that so important I can start like U like from a very high level like we have only three kind of tools in in the whole like public ecosystem like how to get the money like capital how to distribute it and how to evaluate and like from my like opinion we do not have the good product like on market yet like for both three like track but that's the biggest Demand right yeah but but that's three different things that you were talking about what how where would you start and how would you do that get money like yeah of of course like if we do have not have the capital in the first place then like how did how did you like do anything yeah understood yeah anything that gcoin makes I'm just biased but definitely um uh I think um Grand stack I really like Grand stack because I feel like you know um the way it lets uh us experience the power of quadratic funding is incredible and now going on they're experimenting with a lot of other mechanisms as well I think it's extremely important to have uh you know have such tooling where where people can run rounds and probably experience the power of it and I'll just take this moment to also shill my workshop tomorrow it's at 11:00 a.m. in the workshop room and it is very special because um this is a round we are running so it's going to be a live round where people or contributors of gozero Dow zero and Fab da are going to participate we have a matching pool of $3,000 and we will uh spin up the round live and people will apply so uh please make sure that you attend the workshop 11: a.m. tomorrow thanks yeah definitely that's definitely going to be very interesting AB do you have thoughts yeah I mean uh nothing new to add except for yeah communication tools stuff that we use every day like telegram or Discord but like honestly I think it's time for like a more web three native social tool to emerge and I'm definitely like positive that that might come up in the next couple years especially with the kind of companies we've been evaluating at Social graph Ventures right um I think another tool maybe a little bit more like tricky for a lot of people here just like how do you keep track of governance right like I want to be able to see goodcoins like Forum I want to be able to see someone's discourse platform like that's another like I guess problem to solve I don't have a tool that's very like readily available yet what I use I'm personally biased is actually zeron so for example at Hydra I have my Hydra tokens that represent my ownership in Hydra right and if you have a Zion wallet we have a section called Perks within the perks section if you have a governance proposal coming up for say maker or for Hider or any token that you hold you just have all of that listed in your perk section and you're very easily able to you know set a notification for a certain you know expiry date for that proposal so you just make sure you just you know have um the information in one place especially if you're I mean everyone here is chronically online pretty much involved in multiple projects so like just tools to simplify your life so spreadsheet exactly yeah yeah I think that's the only thing to add in addition to what you've already mentioned I'm also curious so when you talk about web 3 based communication tools what what what would you expect or what would you think is important that the current communication tools doesn't really provide yeah good question I mean very simply right like forcaster has 25,000 members everyone including like crypto ERS withal Juan everyone's active on there compare that to Blue Sky which maybe has 3 million members Discord and Twitter which has 100 plus million members I think the difference really is we can build from bottom up like for example the tools that we're evaluating on top of forecaster clients that are being built on top of forecaster right there's Reddit like platforms Discord like platforms there's a lot of tools where now you can actually own your own social graph maybe you can create the ux however you'd like but still Port over all your community members your social graphs so I'd say and maybe involve web play native chat like X SMTP like for me it's more ideological than like all the user experience is going to be a million times better um and the ideological reason is big enough if you have the tech that supports it and you can scale why not right there's going to be a lot of tools that come up where it starts from small growth hacks and conferences like this if you were at DCC you probably saw a coinbase wallet with X SMTP right they had a base Cafe you could actually buy coffee with your onchain funds like I think it starts off gimmicks like that so for me I hate this part like I hate it you know with my soul I use this app called t.

com so it's texts.com so essentially I can aggregate my Discord telegram Instagram messenger WhatsApp all of this in one feed so I just wake up I go to unread I'll see all my unread messages across every tool it's more of a framework for me to prioritize so I think like this still is an ideal like text.com is still a very web tool approach to solve this right so it's more ideological like hey this exists everyone in the space loves a lot of gimmicks like this so it's kind of a good match to solve for 100% um I think we're we're almost on time um what do you guys have anything that you want to share that maybe I haven't asked or uh maybe C has another Workshop or I'm kidding I'm kidding but anything you guys would like to share I want I want to add to like his previous statement like to keep the tool as simple as possible because uh FB uh recently do the experiment about the gitcoin stake like f fun gitcoin and to be honest it's super difficult to use and not like Supernatural so in the end we just to the original transaction and do the QV calculation ourself yeah awesome I mean I can just give a shout out here I mean knowing the kind of people here in the room I'll say like another Community really that I was very uh like glad to be a part of this year was zalu the network State I mean and I bring this up because Gary Shang for example from gitcoin he just left gitcoin recently to like um work on you know bringing the next versions of zulu full-time you know collaborating with governments around the world so whatever it is if you're working in d longevity AI crypto it's an interesting community so I think a lot more Network states are being built there's this tool called fora for for.co they're going to be like a Launchpad for many different network States so like I think that's probably the next evolution in a lot of ways of like what we see now in terms of like more public goods communities a lot of these communities will evolve into like State Network States or like having their own IRL presence um you know with Summits and conferences or whatnot so like yeah just encourage you all no matter what your interest to like try to be part of one of these Network States and just really you know you know kind of experience what that's like CU for me I think that was one of my biggest uh uh biggest value ads this year compared to any of the conferences or Summits I've been to amazing SEL yeah um I think it's extremely important for us to talk to people who work a lot on ground and I just want to give a shout out to my friend Carlos who's sitting there uh he is also the he's the founder of beb3 beach definitely one of the communities which I got inspired from and and I take a lot of inspiration from his work and try to you know translate into my work at Green bill um I think U you know it's super important to really experience what we sort of do on internet and how drastically it is different from you know things on ground it just keeps us uh it gives us a really good idea of what is really needed and how to really go about um a lot of things so yeah I think just um talking to people who really work on ground really really helps and is super important wonderful thank you for your time thank you for your wisdom thank you for your experience thank you very much thank you thank [Music] you