02. Funding the Commons Berlin Builder Residency Update

[Music] I'm excited to be here so I'd like you all to engage on a little experiment with me imagine embarking on a journey to a foreign country with the promise of collaborating with 40 of your peers for a month you've just survived a rigorous application process stepping into a completely unknown container with minimal information to those brave souls in the audience who took that leap of faith please raise your hand I was hoping there'd be more of you but thanks for being here and these are our funding the commons Berlin residents we've assembled a diverse group of 40 individuals from around the globe uniting them in a unique intentionally designed living experiment for a month my name is Sarah and I'm stewarding and facilitating this experiment for the past decade I've delved deep into the intersection of tech web 3 Festival production transformation transformational Gatherings and the regenerative communities movement and I'm humbled and excited to be here now you might wonder why have we embarked on this experiment today there's an urgent challenge we confront public goods essential to humanity faces a funding dilemma and the builders who are propelling the movement forward are burnt out sometimes and often building in isolation so as we sail along the brink of planetary collapse and we continue to see exponential increase of coordination failures because of misaligned incentives we need things to change we need to accelerate the movement the funding the human connections and grow the capacities of the builders and the projects so so what brings me here today I'm lucky to be at the Forefront of this incredible exciting experiment I'm leading the production and operations of the funding the commons residency right here in Berlin and we're just over a week into our experience our mission is to unite the brightest minds and projects from the public goods domain we've gathered entrepreneurs researchers academics designers engineers and researchers together we're crafting a space for these Visionaries to co- live collaborate and develop projects in an organic way we've curated from a pool of over 200 applicants for this pilot residency project here in Berlin at its core our hypothesis centers on nurturing the personal and Collective well-being of Builders we believe in the power of in-person collaboration within the intimate confines of a group of 40 we become a temporary Village why this Moment In Time the inspiration is everywhere from groundbreaking initiatives like Zulu to open- Source infrastructure to Reg to the regenerative communities movement there's so much to be experimented with at this time and times are calling for radical experimentation for more cohesion and connection at the heart of this experiment lies personal regeneration we aim for healthier happier humans in an Engaged community and the EV evolution of development of ideas free from conventional boundaries our ultimate goal is to amplify the capacities of both both the projects and the individuals alike our distinction lies in Our curation intention and execution by introducing rituals and fostering a collaborative atmosphere we see we seek to instill values of prioritizing physical and mental well-being self-sufficiency and autonomy we're surrounded by Lush Greenery and our spaces become a cradle for innovation in building recognizing the symbiosis between healthy food and a thriving mind we ensure individuals are nourished with healthy food and a supportive atmosphere that makes them feel belonging here relationships are blossoming and the humans are regenerating location is Paramount and we are super humbled and appreciative to be in relations with an incredible space here in Berlin for the month we've chosen a cultural Nexus here in Berlin a hub of nonprofits businesses and a home and living container for artists families and innovators it's a community of community of sorts a place resonating with our values and prioritizing public goods in fact the community hosts a neighborhood weekly dinner for over 200 people so our approach marries co-creation with light programming from weekly project update sessions to domain specific workshops to intimate house meetings our structure emphasizes collaboration and co-living and co-living is not always easy by just the nature of what it is but we're leaning into the challenges and the joys of living together working together creating agreements and systems and processes that work for everybody in this residency we have three different houses for for all of our 40 residences residents also organize sessions whether it's meditation breath work gym sessions or cooking nights we're also privileged to have thought leaders and mentors coming in and out of the space working one-on-one with projects over the month the ability to not only tap into the existing Community programming here at our physical location but also the opportunity to integrate within the community and the culture allows for new inspiration and Innovation to emerge think of it like a garden we provide the soil and the space and the builders are bringing the seeds while there's much learning together there's equally a lot of unlearning taking place as well unlike a conference a one- Monon time period paves the way for longer deep deeper conversations and connections and enables relationships to form digestion of ideas and constructive building in an ongoing holistic experience the funding the commons residency is not just a conference or a hackathon or even a residency it's a movement so if you'd like to come and engage with our residency experiment we'd be thrilled to have you please reach out to David or I our contact information will be on one of the uh slides at the end and I'm now going to pass it over to David who will speak more about the funding the commons movement and introduce a few of our residents thank [Applause] you so what are some of the goals that we are striving to accomplish with this residency when I started working with funding the commons uh my mentor and one of the stewards of funding the commons Evan mizono um urged me to think about new ways to create more projects to generate more projects out of this movement and during a two Monon stay at Zulu in Montenegro uh earlier this year I really saw how that could be done um in a different structure or additional to conferences and these are kind of more intentional longer slower spaces that Builders can come together Converse um experiment iterate spend time in different environments and come up with things that wouldn't be possible just during the scope of a conference and so really what we're doing is incubating new projects new public goods um public goods funding infrastructure is one of our focuses but it's not the only one there were so many talented builders that applied from across the spectrum that we decided to expand um the bread of the projects that we accepted so one of the other goals we have is building a community of builders that endures Beyond The Residency and can continue to grow around the world and finally learning from this residency and taking the feedback That We Gather to produce future residencies so one of the things that is really helping us um grow this movement is collaboration with organizations inside and outside of web 3 and as we go into 2024 we will continue to reach Beyond web 3 into web 2 uh philanthropic academic and government spaces so again thank you to the sponsors and partners that made this residency possible protocol Labs octant gitcoin Brave drips and c and thank you C for uh allowing our Builders to use your space during this month as well so these are some of the focus areas of our residency although by no means they're exhausted exhaustive uh public goods funding infrastructure zero knowledge uh stealth donations and private transactions identity and civil resistance and its applications and governance and impact evaluation and certification and without further Ado I would like to introduce some of the residents and have them uh tell you themselves The Experience thank you all right thanks everyone um so I'm going to try to explain a little how uh it have been this last days on the residence for me and the impact of this on me and the project that I'm developing so I'm staff I'm a data scientist I'm Brazilian and I'm on the residency representing my community that's the opena community we are developing and researching um deep learning models to detect civo attacks by their behavior in the context of the Public Funding and besides being really happy nurtured and like developing a lot of uh myself and discovering a lot of stuff like personally uh there's too many aspects that I saw it uh happened and develop it this last six days on residency for my project uh one of them is um discussions that uh I would not have and I haven't uh thought of before because let's think about our projects like normally we are surrounded of people that have the same background and the same Focus as us and some uh questions and discussions just do not emerge in this um um places so uh an example of this like talking about the the the algorithm is that like what about the ethics and this misuse this possible misuse of these algorithms and this is a discussion that emerg on the house so like if you're developing something to detect uh one type of behavior can it be uh used and an open source to uh for example harm uh privacy so so this is something that we are um discussing and another thing is that like because we are on the project and we have so much uh more resources and when I say resources I'm talking about people knowledge and experience there to to nurture our development uh our project have been uh recognized and our poti have been enhanced and uh our partners saw that and for example we applied for a grant uh and should take 30 30 days and took like 3 days because we were in The Residency building uh with these people so we were granted 25k in API credits yeah to develop uh uh our training data set so this is for me it's like the most impactful and the ones the the impacts that I can have in mind from this last only six days that we are there so yeah that's for me thanks hello hello I'm Jan M first of all what a good morning because starting day with digital de democracy is really amazing uh I'm Jen I'm from New Delhi India and over there run a te te research organization called G labs and we work on cryptography stuff and we develop private applications but what I'm doing here so I'm part of the residency I've been living there for 7 days which has been fascinating and and I'm trying to build a way to do to use government IDs to do private voting on chain see with government IDs you can get Cil resistance and with since it's private you get anonymity so you can be anonymous while using your government IDs and vote on chain So speaking of The Residency um as I said I've been there for like 7 days and the and the and the experience is has been amazing uh for example on the on the second day itself I came across three people that were part of the residency that were really excited for what I'm building and were willing to build on top of it so if by the end of the residenc if I'm able to develop this thing they'll be using it for sure um and other than that the the special thing about the residency is like special thing about the co- living the the entire experience of co- living is that it it enables spontaneous conversations so for example if I'm back in Delhi sitting in Med resarch lab or at my home you know thinking about something whether this particular thing would be useful or not whether this way of approaching this problem would be useful or not or whether some complicated solution to something that I'm thinking would that might be useful whether that would play out the way I want it to play out or not I would usually send an email to my colleague or usually send a text over telegram or Discord but when you live in a call of space you're walking through the space with those thoughts in your mind and Co living by definition Paxon a huge amount of people like let's they mentioned like 30 40 people that are really smart and really fantastic and think the same way that you're thinking and sort of uh are concerned about the same problems that you're concerned about they the co- living packs them into one location so when I'm walking through the space I bump into people and then the moment I P I tell them the my thoughts and they tell the perspective on my thoughts and then it sort of goes on in an alterative way which is much faster than I would have experienced when I was in Delhi and it helps a lot in building products and helps a lot in building useful products because a lot of time you just you know start building and then you don't get to get anywhere so it has been an amazing experience uh thanks a lot thanks a lot forwarding [Applause] it uh with the Morgan Berlin I did I say that right um I'm Tomo and yeah and um yeah I don't know what I can say to sh The Residency more than these guys did uh so I'll just maybe say a few more words about my project uh so in 2017 and 18 I co- founded this um conference blog split you'll see here um so this is the biggest Regional web three event for web three technology and use cases in Balkans uh it happens in Split Croatia and over the years so we did we did it almost every year well not during the pandemic of course but uh what we've seen is how um the community of web3 companies and just people who are using the technology building with it um grew over time so now we have like 600 or 700 people showing up every year from all around Balkans so not just Croatia not just Serbia but also all around and even more uh further AP from away like from Europe and rest of the world and what this conference let us do is test new technologies um even maybe pilot some things and there was an idea um few months ago that we could leverage what we have we have very good relationships with lots of Partners including local ones like city of split and the idea that we had is what if we uh try to use web3 technology in partnership with them to improve something and well what can we improve here um obviously the city is uh investing a lot of money into funding public goods and this is something that um it's not um unique problem to them it's a problem that every Community faces and these Municipal public goods are something that's really close to everybody uh all of us live somewhere all of us use some some roads or use some other public infrastructure and the way this public infrastructure is um funded but not only funded but even prioritized is always um well it sometimes it can cause controversies uh we are often not really satisfied with how things are developed or how fast things are solved um so we were thinking maybe we can use what already been built and done in web 3 and luckily we have a lot of there like there is a really lot of tools that we can already use and these are all open source tools so we don't need to um get go through all all of the procedures and all of the dangers that a city has when they're or public any public institution has when they are um trying to um build something new so this is the idea was let's talk with gitcoin or somebody else who is might be interesting to actually uh test their technology in the city of split and if if it turns out successful this is going to be a pilot that we can reuse later on in number of cities and start funding Municipal Goods throughout the world and uh potentially uh if we are able to um on board people through it so if we are able to onboard citizens of split to web three tools through this we believe that this could actually be a very good onboarding solution or way to onboard new users uh to web 3 and um this I this would all stay just on on idea if uh there weren't for funding the commons uh luckily I just running to David in Paris at the conference we talked a little bit and then he told me about this great incubator that they are having and uh for me when I talk think about incubator I think about why combinator and institutions like this which are very successful but in completely different area they're mostly focused on building startups well this residence is um like zalone meets white combinator it's it really is uh you uh so you don't need to have incubator for startups like uh next unicorns or something like this you can have uh incubators for people and teams that want to build uh tools that will move Humanity forward and they're going to be just as motivated to do so and I think this is great I think this uh uh residence in Berlin is actually really doing the right thing for that yeah this was all in one breath all right so thank you everybody thank you residents for taking the leap and coming to Berlin and being with us and thanks for getting on stage on a moment's notice all right