11. Blue Funds Fireside Chat - Lisbon 2022

thank you and Welcome to our free willing fireside chat on the topic of the blue on the topic of blue funds our model blue fund and our model blue funer for the evening will be Mr will Scott we'll talk we'll use the private retrieval blue fund as our example um and then now is the time for me to introduce our one slide I guess does everyone know what a blue fund does everyone know the terminology blue fund okay cool uh so the idea with blue funds and the team of network Goods which is um sort of all of us more or less plus or minus will is a friend or a fan of the network Team Network Goods team uh but we look at regenerative public goods and we're specifically interested in blue funds so the term within blue funds is sort of an initiative by the network funding Team Network Goods team at protocol ABS to decentralize our fun funding efforts by uh propagating infrastructure that would be Financial legal operational Administration administrative to essentially enable teams to launch uh their own public goods investment vehicles or support things like novel tooling so we're kind of trying to create a y combinator essentially model but doing that for public goods so really optimizing the supply sorry the supply chain I still have 20 minutes uh optimizing sort of the pipeline of operational infrastructure legal support to really um accelerate Pro projects and ideas into the ecosystem so for someone like myself who's worked a lot in Open Source Hardware and open source software uh one of the Bott necks has always been administrative tasks uh payment time speed um implementation documentation all these sort of things so that's something that we really try to support with our blue funds effort excellent yeah so for this particular um initiative we used a research initiative as our as our for Into the Blue funds model and so it's essentially we tried to spin up research initiatives as a service um encourage researchers and Engineers from our Network and from the broader Community to come with come to us with their ideas maybe to bring a research artifact or two and for our team uh in this case my team in network research and our sibling team uh research acceleration and network funding to turn that into a full-fledged fun research initiative research funding opportunity that means taking the artifact um composing that in to some sort of a an appropriate open problem or request for proposals disseminating that request for proposals yes okay this is our one slide so enjoy um helping to build an advisory committee to perform the the evaluation function so there's of course several layers of evaluation the evaluation of the proposal to create a blue fund itself sort of the meta evaluation then the evaluation of proposals that takes place as applicants who who wish to participate in the program um submit the applications as they would for other types of research programs whether it's a grant program a bounty program a prize program building all those structures creating a repeatable playbook for implementing this again over time and as as Addie said building a pipeline that we can hook up essentially to different sources of funding um break down recompose as needed a flexible framework to support many different types of efforts and of course not just research efforts it just happens that this first one was a really excellent research opportunity and I guess I'd like to turn it over to will to describe exactly what the problem was what your what your interest was what what caused you to come to us yeah and and I guess for me the description of the the specific problem that we're that we're using for this first uh blue fund I think also is useful in helping to make this a little bit more concrete and help motivate what this looks like and what we're what we're thinking about uh and so as is on the slide um the the blue fund that I'm involved with is is on private retrieval and and so the specific problem that we looked at and thought was a good fit um is we were looking at ipfs and filecoin and web 3 in general all the work that that uh my team which is very much a product team in PL um is involved in and we realized that there's a need for better privacy stories and better privacy Technologies for us to use in building that and some of that you know there's tools and you could you could uh do contracts you could do specific grants you could try figure out how to use them but there was a gap where when we look at how how would I if I was today going to add privacy into some of these I'd be looking at the current generation of mix Nets and I'd really be trading off latency and making a worse product in doing that but at the same time coming from an academic background I I know there's a lot of other mechanisms that are out there that researchers are working on but none of them have gotten over this Gap there's a lot of things where there's papers on them and there's maybe small prototypes but there's no demonstration of them at scale and it's a area where the academic ideas that are coming are they're keep being new ones and they're keep being new interesting things that people are thinking about and so the thought was it would be really valuable to us and it would be this General Good Very broadly uh to support that privacy research such that when we revisit this problem from a product perspective in three or five years we've got more options and so what does that mean we think there's a gap between how Academia is currently funding this space of privacy Tech uh which is primarily focused on getting into some top conferences there's some government funding but there's not so much about can you take your prototype and get it up to the first 10,000 or first 100,000 users so small prototype funds to nonprofits and more specifically how do you think about privacy Beyond just low latency web which is really where it is as the like the flashy demo which has a whole set of problems that we don't actually have and so if you can do privacy for messaging or for Content address data which is very applicable to us but has different perspect like different different characteristics and gives you more options there's a bunch of opportunities um for for being able to to come up with interesting papers um and so the thought was this blue fund structure gives us a way uh to come back to this problem in a few years and have a much better outlook on what we'll be able to integrate into ipfs and filecoin and EXC that's actually you've really captured what's this slide is meant to represent the idea that the blue fund is meant to help Transit projects from science from more the pure research Blue Area to the green production deployment productionizing where there is a there are limited funding sources available there are limited structures for supporting projects in ways Beyond funding actually and maybe Addie if you want to talk a little bit about the types of structures that you see po potentially being useful in the future that we can deploy using the blue funds uh rubric yeah definitely I mean we've we're we recently launched the ipfs fund so that's really kind of identifying accelerating projects within ipfs but for me specifically I mean Wills will is a great example uh tooling is is an issue things like solving for latency is I think a really common issue within security implementations and so there's really specific things that um I'm interested in but at a larger kind of um ecosystem level I think we're looking at scientifically based implementations as well as non-scientific based implementations so we're trying to kind of reach across from what I would consider um a lot of what PL has done in the past which is traditionally fund just research initiatives but go outside of Academia and really um look at researching funding and researching and supporting things that can actually be applied in real world in the field in regime States and kind of places that there's applications outside of just the University University and so that's something that I really want to hope to Accel I hope to kind of accelerate in the next year as well things like fbm or Li PDP I mean we have so many great projects and so many great ideas and it's really about sort of um to some extent like Juan was saying um looking at and kind of recognizing what are these really specific things that we can recognize that are holes or gaps or bottlenecks and how can we support those so that they then release a whole another kind of microcosm or macrocosm of of events and projects possibilities awesome a really exciting future and one thing I want to hang on one thing you just said I'm taking over the moderator RS because I'm in the middle I can't help it sorry um you mentioned supporting projects that are outside of research outside of Academia and I think what's really cool about Will's blue fund is that it has a research component but it also has a really important prototyping implementation component would you mind speaking to that for a second sure yeah so I mean I think this came from a couple things and and one was just when we were thinking what what are sort of the the canonical like ideas of work that we think would be good to support with this which was I think one of the useful exercises is like what is what is you know an example of of something that you would think this fund should support and when I was thinking about that it really was a mix of both well you know if a research group comes and comes up with a great idea and there's a new paper that's exciting and brings a new a new technique that turns out to be applicable that would be a great thing that we should definitely be supporting but we also need this this transition to practice and there's a big gap where there's a set of nonprofits that aren't applying for grants in the same way or that are really sort of at at low levels where where funding can make a a huge difference and where there is a much more of that Gap uh and it seemed like a larger impact even um in in potentially allowing some of those entities where there's a lot of practitioners who have a lot of direct knowledge um to to be able to prototype and then build um technology artifacts rather than than papers uh in advancing that um so so I think we we said we were allocating roughly half and half where we're going to try and be funding um roughly half towards academic is where the the outcome that gets proposed is things like papers uh or measurement evaluations and roughly half where the outcome that's being proposed is towards sof software artifacts um yeah yeah thanks for that and I think you just mentioned independently two words that are very important to us impact in evaluation and I want to put them together and make them kiss and ask you about how you plan to evaluate these projects as they come in in your role as the Dr as the as the blue fun the leader of this blue fund and the types of support that you've assembled to help you pick pick which projects we want to fund and how to determine what a successful outcome means and and we're going through the whole story of this blue fund again in in microcosm right because so so so my my role here in some sense was initially making that pitch that I just gave to all of you five minutes ago of why this is an important problem where us funding this as a general Commons where we don't necessarily get a direct Grant back is still a good thing for us and so then the work was okay what is the structure and I got very lucky uh in that a lot of the structure just sort of happened and I didn't have to do anything uh and so my main role was uh assembling an advisory committee so reaching out to a set of people I thought would be really good to evaluate inbound proposals uh I'm really happy uh with the advisory committee we have for this uh we've got a set of external researchers um Philip winter is at Brave research um was previously um doing a bunch of measurements academically around tour and privacy Tech um we've got cathrina who's at um a university in the Netherlands uh who's also been doing a bunch of research on on measurement and then we've got um Rosario and Henry so we've got a mix from uh industry from Academia from research uh who really spam this and who are all experts in the area and can and can review uh these proposals and comment on them um that structure also got set up as a very lightweight ask on these external advisor board body um and and and that means that that this whole process ends up being uh I think hopefully um uh faster and and lower effort than than a traditional funding uh structure um where both it's able to be reused and then the work that we're asking for the specific uh practitioners in this problem uh can really be tightly focused uh where we're not having to think about you know finding the time to have the PC in person where we spend the day doing like conference review or stack ranking or something but rather can have a pretty lightweight commenting on uh rolling applications uh and then and then getting to a decision quickly as they come through awesome can you talk a little bit about sort of what you anticipate in terms of the road map and what you're looking for in terms of things that you might potentially fund sure um we we opened a little over a month ago uh with the initial call for paper uh and and sent out a set of emails or a call for proposals uh and sent out um a sort of a first round of communication uh we've gotten in uh initial proposals uh that that are under evaluation uh with our advisory committee now we're doing that first uh pass through uh ironing out everything making sure uh that we're happy with the questions that we're asking and so forth uh and are sort of on the way towards the first round of funding uh I think the the thought is that uh I I did targeted Outreach to uh with that first sort of it it now exists here's the website here's how you apply um to a set of candidate projects that I thought would be um well suited such that we can then have the the first round who are getting funding as the here's the example of the things we want to fund because that gives subsequent rounds of applicants a much clearer view of what is the focus here because you can say well here's past things that we think were really cool um but when they see that you've actually funded a set of things that's a really clear signal of like what is the focus of this fund um so so that's sort of the thought is there's there's sort of a trial run both thund understand how much time we're actually taking through all of this uh as we get started um but then also that helps focus and and make it a clearer vision fantastic and I guess maybe I don't know how much time we have we have being signaled off so I think that's EXC that's all the time we have today to talk about blue funds but if you have any questions if you'd like to meet us in the breaks or chat with us afterward please tag us we'd love to chat absolutely yeah thanks so much W thank [Applause] you