Open Conversations: On Gitcoin, Digital Public Goods & Plurality Tools (Scott Moore)

[Music] hi I'm Scott a co-founder of gitcoin and Public Works uh my work mostly involves funding open source software and other kinds of digital public [Music] KS so the main thing that gcoin is known for is quadratic funding which is a democratic mechanism for funding all kinds of public Goods including digital public goods and what we mean by quadratic funding is taking a matching pool a large pool of capital that some philanthropic donor might have and distributing that according to the sentiment of a much larger population that might have more local stake or more direct [Music] impact the goal is really to make sure that the people who actually have domain expertise who have context and who who care about a certain domain are actually able to have an impact in what's being funded and I think bringing public goods to the Forefront has been a really important part of the mission for me in the space the biggest realization came from trying the first quadratic funding round with falic and others and realizing that actually the community really was willing to participate in funding especially ethereum public goods and that was sort of partly surprising because there's no direct intuitive reason that people should be willing to put money into these kinds of infrastructure pieces that we you know all use in in the web 3 or 3 ecosystem and what people decided I guess was that you know in even in a self-interested sense by funding these things they're actually benefiting the broader Collective but also themselves the same way as you might see people contributing to a city if everyone maintains the city you get something really special that can emerge from the existence of shared space and I think the more we can create those bridges the more that these organizations will succeed so far it's been amazing to be back in Tokyo at all the last time I was here was 2019 before the pandemic and for me the the actual sort of community here has always been one that I've actually resonated with a lot but I do think genuinely there's something about more collectivist culture that feels uh more sort of cohesive and more aligned and I've noticed that a lot in even the way that the communities come together around playing The Commons [Music] Tokyo the good part about the internet is that uh it's really easy to uh exist in in your own head uh when you come back to physical reality you have to contend with the lights and the camera and the world around you you should try to do something that you think will actually make a difference in the real world crypto is very abstract there's a lot of products that people don't necessarily need there's a lot of hype there's a lot of noise that's increasingly true as the space grows but I think you can still do a lot of good if you're looking in the right places and if you're doing something that matters to a local community even locally online that you're part of and find those things care about those things and make them your focus everything in our world is built by people and I think we often forget that even the internet things that exist online there's people behind that that are making it work when we're looking at a lot of these abstract Concepts in web 3 or crypto or decentralized web landscape plurality landscape we're talking about things that seem much more complex than they are but we're really just people trying to come to agreements about things that matter to us and make sure that those are sustained in some meaningful Way digital public goods are fundamentally Goods that exist fully online so the internet itself is a digital public good but so is the software that's built on top of it the software that we use to run even this film set is entirely based on the work of people who often are underpaid often are doing it for free in their spare time and so digital public goods to me is are fundamentally Global public goods that are underserved underfunded and often um in the context of even you know nation states who have their own interests under represented in in [Music] discussions I think the best advice I can give someone who wants to be involved in ethereum is don't be afraid to just try things and to get involved [Music] oh