36. Philosophies for Public Goods Funding - Taipei 2023

[Music] yeah really excited to be here um we you know everyone's been giving really exciting talks yesterday today um this is the last panel of fun in the Commons so I'm really excited to try to tie it all together in a more philosophical way um so to start off I think you know M people here might already know you guys but let's just in case people don't why don't we give a one minute introduction of who you guys are you guys do would you start cool yeah hey everyone uh my name is alos I'm originally from Greece but I'm based in Berlin Germany I previously founded the radical project which is a decentralized code collaboration Network and the drips project which is a tooling for funding your critical software dependencies um I'm julan zosi mostly based in waro Poland I'm leading Golem Foundation which is a spin-off of uh golden project which was one of the uh very first uh project to be crowdfunded on on ethereum through the token sale um yes and the our main project is is octant at the moment with the focus on on public goods funding and the glm uh use case all right David Casey here director of funding the commons uh based in the San Francisco Bay area and globally and we do these conferences around the world as well as hackathon and Builder residencies for uh developers of open- source public goods and we are really focused on bringing together the builders researchers academics protocols that are uh unified around the desire to more effectively uh fund public goods and experiment and innovate on how to do so better thank you yeah so my name is Jackie I'm organizer of bual and we're also having our conference next starting tomorrow tomorrow t BL next door um so to talk about public goods I think really it's coming comes down to how do we measure impact how do we fund things are impactful and you know what is the right way to fund impact and the right source of funding for impact so these are the high level points we're going to touch about today uh and I'd like to start off the first question about um what is the best way to measure quantify impact um would you like to start yeah I mean it's a really it's a really broke question I think the my short answer this it very much depends on you know who you are your value system the community you're part of this the answer is very different you know if you are a government and I know that we had some participants from the government here or if you are an extremely well funded Dow or you're a traditional corporation uh so it depends you know it depends it depends on what what is it that you want to see in the world uh I think the main point that I want to communicate here is that the question is important right so the question is important and your community it is important for your community to actually try to engage in the question uh but I feel that the answers will be very much depending on what you're really trying to accomplish and what kind of world you envision so maybe we can go deeper if if someone wants to go deeper but yeah I may so so you know I this is in a way like a political question because um uh when you when you are measuring impact of course is to inform you whether it was worth funding that whether the funding should continue and you know this is never a binary decision in a way that um there is always an opportunity cost so if you fund something you do not fund something else at least if this is like the like a limited uh resoures allocation problem and and because of that um and at the end of the day you need to measure things just to inform the public but at the end of the day like you need like a good mechanism for the public to take the decision based on exactly their value systems um what they think is important what they think is not important I hope that builds well on what you said yeah totally yeah so echoing what uh both of you said the the values are important um like what are we valuing and I think it's important to be explicit about that and and state the vales um the community For Whom the impact is being measured is important so we we use this word public goods very broadly but generally there is a specific public whether it's uh the crypto Community the population of Taiwan the population of the planet Earth these are all kind of like different uh publics uh so for whom is the uh the impact being measured and um who is doing the measuring uh is the me measurer or the evaluator trusted uh by the community that the impact is intended for is it Community Driven measurement um or is it more like a top down measurement so I think these are all interesting questions to look at when designing uh an impact evaluation system yeah sounds like there's a lot of new yeah if I can add one one more thought here is that I think you know taking a more um uh practical perspective of where as a space we are with regards to public goods funding I would say that the main impact that we collectively having is the fact that we engineering a culture of valuing public goods like if you really think about what has happened in the space since you know the since since funding public goods started to become a movement I think that you know look at some of the biggest success stories like gitcoin or retr pgf still it's very hard for some of those projects to actually talk about impact but we all collectively can see that well you know like they have sparked the interest around funding public goods they have made that part of the agenda right so I think you know continuing to push this idea of like let's you know move away from the degenerate and you know selfish nature of the crypto space and let's create something that actually values public good is is I think a lot more valuable at the moment rather than trying to actually get extremely precise on like you know this is the precise impact that you know my allocation had on gitcoin round one I don't try to discredit that and I think that we get getting to the place now that actually being able to measure the impact that each of those different mechanism and each of these different communities are having is very very important but I think it's important that we recognize where we are in that Journey it sounds like um how we measure impact for public goods something that's really contextual and subjective to you know where you're from or what you're building and who are people who are verifying the impact um and you mentioned a lot of different mechanism of kind of providing public goods including like quadratic funding quadratic voting uh retro pgf when you go about designing a way to fund public goods what method mechanism do you choose and what's the philosophy behind each of those decisions uh maybe David you want to start with this one yeah I think uh we have uh couple people on stage innovating in uh design of public goods funding systems uh for me again it's like what is the community um that we are directing the public goods funding towards uh what is the value system of that Community how can we make um the community uh participate to to the optimum or maximum uh capacity uh in the process of you know designing the system and um having input and and again controlling the the evaluation and measurement um yeah those are those are some thoughts I want to give the stage to you too go yeah I I think this is like the obvious for us here on the stage but that may be not obvious for the for the whole audience that um I I will try to connect some of the dots that were like a mentioned in the in the in the speeches before so one of them was what the BR said that this like a space like is is like a flooded with money you know in a way so so so like a money is not an issue so so what is an issue an issue is like how we take decisions how we exactly decide what is important what is not important and and I think that the the fact that we are witnessing this like a growing regenerative like a momentum for for for um for this space is not only because like the as de centralized blockchain web three space we need some healing Factor after all the bads that happened over the past few years and we are kind of like a looking for for the goal for the purpose of what we are doing and that needs like a fits nicely but I think the second problem is that we can more and more see that like a legacy mechanism we have for the resources allocation so basically like through the governments are are less and less efficient they are not really suitable to the to the problems we face as the as as the modern world and then coming to the methods you know like this is like the whether this is like a quadratic funding or quadratic voting or like any other like a fashional method at the end of the day this is like just a tool but but but this is like a tool which also like becomes part of the answer because I I I think that we as the space have this like a strong tendency to go towards like a mechanism designs even if they are not about like the like exploiting people greet but just like you know incentivize like what matters and and and I think like ultimately that's like part of the of the of the bigger solution of the of the whole system you want to build for this particular problem yeah I want to add something interesting that we as an industry have an opportunity for which is um designing and and experimenting and innovating with public goods funding systems that can be exported Beyond web 3 into the kind of Real Worlds and give uh crypto the purpose that it's been looking for for many years yeah to to add my perspective on on on the on the question I would like to First Echo the point that the previous presenter from Octan made that you know we tend to over index on mechanisms like the space like you know really has a thing for mechanisms but if you actually look at the mechanisms they have their holes right and maybe something else is happening behind the scenes so what what I mean by that is that uh like you know when I first look at gitcoin I was uh as a person that engaged in mechanic design I was actually skeptical because of the identity component right like you know how can you do this a decentralized setting but in fact gitcoin has been extremely successful in my opinion not because you know people understand quadratic funding I actually done a lot of Guerilla research and if you go speak to someone and you try to explain to them what quadratic funding means people don't grasp the math you know like they struggle with the math in fact but what gitcoin really nailed was that it managed to actually make um you know bringing a community together to decide about public goods independent of the mechans and I think this is extremely powerful and I would like to share a story from you know my own Journey when we started the radical project in one of the first um sessions we had you know we were like talking with the team about the fact that hey we want to make this a DA we want to make this be a thing where you know decision making actually like you know is not centralized on a few individuals and at the time we had around you know 15 people in the room and I asked them like how many of you have actually participated in some form of decentralized decision making organiz ization and there was not a single hand not including mine right so what I'm trying to say with that is that I think this idea of having communities get together to decide which public goods to fund I think this is even more powerful than the mechanisms I think and now like going to retr pgf same story with retr pgf is actually fantastic it's a definition thing if you really look at like you know how does the voting happen I'm sure that not a single person in the room knows how how are the badge holders elected can one of you answer like probably you don't know that right so you see that as a as a mechan design we still patching and that's absolutely okay but I think the main contribution that retr pgf is bringing to the group is that oh well look you know we like we actually using all of those things these things having an impact can we retroactively go fund them so um what I'm trying to say is that mechan are great and there are a lot of great ones we actually you know have developed something that we call dependency funding which we're doing with drips which tries to value what you're doing now not like you know prospective or retrospective we think is exciting but uh all in all I think culture is the thing that matters the most can we create a culture of giving and can we make that part of daily operations and enable more people to experience that culture values and bring in a community to make decisions together um we we mentioned a lot about gitcoin as a really successful example uh so let's talk about the funding sources uh what type of sources of funding do you guys find acceptable there's a famous case recently about Shell's um collaboration with gitcoin uh to accelerate climate Solutions and some people criticize it as greenwashing um what are you guys' take on that situation is any funding source okay or what are the like kind of the uh you know how do you judge if the funding source is okay or not okay um yeah I have some pretty strong opinions on this one so um for those who are less aware of the history of shell you can look up Ken Saro wewa a Nigerian environmental activist and filmmaker who was uh basically hanged assassinated executed in 1995 uh the shell Corporation was found uh was brought to court and settled out of court paid $15 million to his family um he was uh basically covering and documenting the um pollution and contamination uh in his indigenous home land of Nigeria and so um for me the reputation cost of associating with uh these kinds of entities is uh extremely dangerous in my opinion for a brand like gitcoin which has um built such a positive reputation over so many years um I think there are ways to uh take donations and funding um without strongly associating um with the brands I don't know if shell in particular like uh if there is a way to do it with a corporation like shell um I think there's a spectrum of corporations that have um varying degrees of um you know crimes that they've committed in the past and um not to say that um they can't atone for their sins um but from the perspective of a public goods funding protocol like gitcoin um I think that the kind of risk to reputation is is pretty extreme in in that case in particular anything add yeah think I think I think David like I I I agree with what David said it very much again depends on the values of that Community right like I I like the way I experienced that I saw the backlash on Twitter which shows that there was some disconnect you know between the action of partnering with like a cell and you know what that Community Values or the way this partnership was either designed or communicated uh beyond that is a is a subjective code like you know a part of me says well you know Capital going towards funding and sustaining and maintaining public goods that's you know that's good that that that that's a good thing and and I personally you know wouldn't like like I would be I would be supportive of that but under under the conditions that that David said it's a really subtle line anyone anyone that has dealt with with a decision like that will know that it's a really elegant play navigating you know those those different in anything to add J well yeah I can add to that that to me like a regardless of like a who shall what shall e and and what they did in the past you could say about any cooperation with the any any any any Corporation any any cooperation with the corporation that it it feels a little bit like um in the earlier days of like the blocking movement when we had like a huge announcement this or that that big company starts using like the blockchain technology for this or that and and usually that was like just useless uh Shilling and and at the end of the day it turned out that that was some kind of like a customade proof Authority blockchain uh which was like the like a nonsens nonsense in in in in any possible way but on the other hand you could say that this is something that helps like a mainstream things like a build awareness and and and and so on so so that could seem like being not not obvious but I think that at the end of the day if you if you want to like really like a change things Advance the the change well you should not sleep with your enemy uh probably and and and I think like that the like that the like in that case that would be the case exactly and on top of that I would also think that uh I I also think that what is really important is to build um things that are like a longterm sustainable and like the like a and of course I'm comfortable saying that now being octant but but but like get getting donations like is is not like a long-term sustainable so so you cannot like uh um serf on that wave forever like that's my feeling at least yeah I guess it's really tough to like where do we draw the line on what's accept um you know we talk a lot about corporations about greed about capitalism where do we draw the line right because we all want public goods to get more funding to get more attention and we live in such a a tension economy today where you know how do we should we play the intention game right should we should we financialized impact or if we don't what are the Alternatives um you guys have any thoughts on I guess in terms from the capitalistic point of view what can be applied to public goods what shouldn't where do we draw the line and what are some Alternatives yeah I mean I I I will share two thoughts I think the one like I will say I I will say too clear you know like no goes uh so the one the one concern I always had about engaging with the space is this overall trend of hyper financialization right and I think again the previous speaker from oan covered that quite a lot like this space tends to over value in financial incentives right like let's add the financial incentive where actually one is not needed right and this is I've seen I've seen this multiple times going really wrong and I'm again concerned about the culture that this creates right like you come in and you introduce a financial incentive where one is not needed and then you effectively like distorted something that was actually healthy and now that's not healthy right so that's one clear thing that like at least on my own personal like you know like map I always try to look at that and say hey like are what we doing introducing more of that right and it's not again an easy answer like operating in the space you know with with incentives it it it's a hard one but that's one that I I personally always try to keep an eye on and ask that question to myself like am I contributing more to this hyper financialized Society with the work I do yes or no and then the other one is basically like uh I think this whole idea of Humane Technologies the previous speaker just touched a little bit on that uh but again you know many of us coming from the web two world we we have either engineered or consumed systems that try to you know like distract you from something try to lock you in like like mindset and focus wise into something and unfortunately like multiple times I have experienced the same thing myself with tokens like I don't know how many of the participants here like you know there's a token and then you just like you know taking the price right like you know and you keep taking the price right so so there is some something there's there there's something there to be really you know that that is extremely dangerous when you're combining Financial incentives and this attention economy this is a you know this is an atomic bomb of sorts so I I would say these are the two things that I'm trying to keep an eye on hyper financialization and then like is this thing that I'm engineering fulfilling enable enabling the Fulfillment of that user or is trying to lock that user in in a system that is actually very far away from the themselves and what they try to accomplish in the world yeah I'll go ahead and say um EO La the uh danger of like poisoning intrinsic motivations through introducing uh an external uh kind of financial incentive uh I think there's exceptions but it is something that has been documented and uh we heard about earlier this evening this afternoon um the second thing that I wanted to say is that specifically in web 3 protocols that are generating revenue and are relying on open source libraries and this is a lot of what drips is doing I believe should think about how to fund their dependencies how to give back to the ecosystem and I think that optimism is is doing one uh it's one way of doing it it's introducing a protocol fee or or a sequencer fee that's that's a transaction fee basically that is taken from every transaction and put into public goods cell is doing this as well and and other protocols and this is kind of just replicating a tax system from the public sector from governments um it is a system that has worked through the centuries and I think there are uh basic lessons that we can learn from the Real Worlds in in uh public goods funding and and integrate into crypto and we don't always have to invent new mechanisms um so one of the definitions of the public goods is that those are Goods that cannot be they get delivered by the market in an efficient way so so so you cannot really like uh put that to Market forces of course you can think about like how to incentivize people with the monitary means I don't think that would be like efficient at the end of the day uh on the the other hand like the we are working with what we have at hand and and basically like this community is um is historically driven by greed uh and I and I don't think that this is like that comes as a surprise to to anyone here and and and I would say that what we Tred to do we try to patch it here and there and and and and and build things that could like a bring a transformation so so so at the end of the day I I don't think that the financial incentives are like um not only they are not a solution they are not even possible but but on the other hand like you could you could look at for example what we do with octant as like a one providing some kind of like a Ubi for like a c group of community that has some some and then like providing a way to self taate in a in a reasonable way with also like the like the overall like a taxation mechanism that ensures like a huge pile of of of of of of tokens to do to do things and and I think that for example in optimism I think like this this this could be seen as a similar thing because like there is like just in tax and one of the reasons we are sitting here and having all those interesting discussions is because ethereum has not not implemented tax on top of U of of the rewards that are in the in ethereum so we have to go and figure that ourselves how how how to do that so so I hope that's somehow related to your question yes yes absolutely I think it's really interesting um you know we say corporate capitalism the greed has historically been what works to motivate people but you also bring up a good point early about um you don't want to ruin the intrinsic motivation of people to want to do good things to public goods how do you kind of Judge uh when a certain mechanism kind of could pollute the intrinsic motivation versus the external I think that's really because sometimes when people volunteer their own time to do something they're passionate about they love it right but as soon as you start paying them or as soon as it becomes Financial monetary incentivization it kind of changes the whole Dynamics it changes the culture uh it changes how humans behave um how do you kind of Safeguard against that it's yeah go go ahead David please okay yeah I have an interesting example from uh the book Freakonomics and basically it is a school where parents pick up their children and they are coming late and picking up their children late and there are basically teachers that have to stay after school for 30 minutes 45 minutes an hour to uh receive uh to receive the parents and so the school wants to ameliorate this problem and they try a financial solution which is to find the parents to charge them money to uh have the pay for the teachers extra hours seems logical so what ends up happening is the opposite of the intended consequences all the parents uh lose their social shame of being late because now they can just pay and they end up coming 2 hours late instead of 30 45 minutes yeah yeah and I think there are numerous examples like that this a gray one uh and I think the answer to your question is you study the past and you know you study what has happened because we have had already like you know many waves of you know funding public goods or crowdfunding and then you asked the question that the previous speaker asked like you know why do people give right like why do people give public goods many times you know the answer is like uh because they wna be part of the world that this person is creating they want to belong you know like that like I think simply by you know asking the question to yourself of like okay I want to engineer a mechanism or I want I want to create that world where people are giving more public goods right sometimes the answer is that okay you know my community will need a new ritual like I mentioned before you know I think getcoin at first was more of like a ritual right like you know that vitalic really was trying to bring to ethereum and because it's vitalic a lot of people were like hey like this is interesting here doesn't matter that it doesn't you know like do identity stuff perfectly well right so so yeah it it very much depends but I think studying the past and asking the question of like okay what am I really trying to create and you know what motivates a person to have the behavior that I want then usually will lead you like to avoid some of the some of the issues with financialization and introducing Financial incentives where there's no need for them yeah I think that people can be motivated by non-monetary incentives like a absolutely so and have nothing to add um yeah I I think maybe the last question here is uh maybe on a more personal level what kind of brought you into public goods and how does that what what motivates you internally intrinsically to dedicate yourself to public goods yeah yeah uh on my side like what brought me to the to the web three space Maybe in general that that will lead into me my story on public goods but I previously used to work for SoundCloud I'm a musician myself a hobbyist nothing professional and I joined SoundCloud I was an early employee there stayed with them for many years but the reason why I joined SoundCloud was because uh back in 2009 2010 web 2 was the one that was making the promise of this intermediation so you know these web two companies at the time were making the promise that we will now decentralize effectively from these really extractive rent Seekers of the music industry and I joined SoundCloud and I saw the whole transition of SoundCloud you know going from nothing into like something that I think at some point we had 200 million users using it every month right and I realized at some point that this isn't it like these new people are the new Gatekeepers and the promise is lost and then I started looking into crypto networks as a new way of enabling this form of dis intermediation and that's how I found myself in the web 3 Community um because I got really excited about the idea of uh user owned and operated Network or Community owned and operated networks and then in the web three space uh it was uh basically this uh greed that you talked about the greed can be aot motivator for some things but also can be a motivator for other things so I saw this you know tendency for this extreme selfishness and I was like hey you know this is really off I hope that some people actually will use those technologies that enable transparency that enable communal ownership for something different and luckily I found myself in this community but the story is that if this wasn't the community I don't know if we will be here talking about public goods and and and um working on things right so I think the movement and the fact that there is a movement is extremely important love it know if Julian and David you guys want to share your personal story how you got into public goods well that that would be quite long but uh just to try to summarize so so before I I I started like a working in the in a web 3 space which was back then not called like a web three yet um I I I I I I'm economist by by trade and and I also work mostly with the public uh secretary economics and even then I I believe the the like a our uh governance mechanisms and our like a allocation mechanism are somehow broken and and even like the in the very very early days of ethereum I saw this promise of using that system for governance um which I haven't worked for on for for for for quite a long time being in ethereum and and at the moment like you know we we are able to connect many dots and and also attack that problem uh with what we do and I'm really happy about that awesome I I see that as like you know like um um I I I don't have an ambition that that we will you know like challenge all the problems and solve all the problems of the world there but at least we will be like a creating a sunbox and and helping other like a playing in that sunbox to to to to find useful stuff love it D want yeah all right so yeah I would say my journey started with the discovery of uh some economists that were writing about the uh integration of the biosphere um the physical reality around us into um economic systems uh one Herman daily the steady state and EF shoem marer small as beautiful are two really interesting economists that really reframed uh how to understand value for me then um let's see I think that got me on a journey of what is valuable uh for human beings and other species here and um how does money relate to that and how how does money capture and embody um the values that that we share and um for the first time with crypto I think communities have the opportunity to design value systems um the way I think of crypto is like uh social or behavioral engineering at scale which is like a dangerously powerful tool um that can be used for good or for other purposes um I started experimenting with token economies around 2015 this was before the ethereum m not was live so we were using uh colored coins protocol on bitcoin and uh the experiment was how to create um Community issued uh like Debt M Mutual Credit backed by goods and services that could be traded directly um amongst communities and and individuals and that really opened my mind to um how can we Empower communities to embed their values into uh economic and AR systems and um since then my Journey's taken me on a lot of places but I would say uh climate and nature and the relationship between uh the biosphere air water uh food these basic resources and and value is really um like like if you think about what is uh how valuable is water to humans and how uh how valuable is it if you're in the desert uh without water and or or air how valuable is air if you don't have it so like these kind of value is relative based on on what access you have to it and um I think our current system of of money and finance does not really take into account a lot of these kind of basic things of like what what is valuable for for human beings to to survive and thrive on this planet yeah I think um personally I find people who are motivated by public goods some of the best people best community in the world uh with a good heart and just wholesome people in general so thank you all for sharing your personal stories why are you motivated to do public goods and some of the philosophies behind um all the things we talk about today around public goods so yeah that's it for today thank you everyone thank for having us thank [Applause] [Music] you