ETHKL24 | Yufei Zhang | Public Goods Funding: Sustainability and Impact Measuring

uh up next we love to welcome e um to talk about sustainability uh and measuring impact with uh public goods as well hi folks nice to see you today so I'm trying to make this session more like a talk show and not like a speech and I'm trying to like um doing some roasting on the public good since I already found a lot of fun facts on the on this topic so let's get started uh thanks so much for nicoo for mentioning GCC in the first place so as a normal startup I would like first to uh introduce what GCC is so basically our uh full name is like Global Chinese Community for digital comment uh we don't really quite use the word public goods anymore because we find that the concept public goods is more vague and it's just like can cover so many so many things so uh from our name you can see that we are more folks used on the digital Commons um primarily the open source communities open source projects and some open source like intellectual uh properties that's what we are uh we all when we are like uh introducing oursel as GCC it's always uh confusing because it's also the name of a compiler but we just like not the compiler GCC but the public is funding or the open source funding uh GCC uh just just one send to describe what we're doing we're just basically sending money to the public goods projects we believe in and especially for the uh for those are built by Chinese and Asian so that's our primary goal and our primary like U model so uh in second part I'm going to work through some of the things we have done some of the projects we have donated to already uh so uh the first one is getcoin asan run uh in the past uh GG why I think we have donated to multiple like projects including esale and some of the uh other interesting projects you can see on our Twitter for more details also donated to the sum of prodal I think this is a really fun part because the sum of prodal um are happening in the past summer we actually H have collected like 70 plus high quality applications and some of those uh proposals are accepted to the main program and we have seen like over seven I think 70k U USD to the entire application in the coming uh devcom uh we will have a like sop week the protocal week which will demonstrating our like uh effort in theop uh in at Edge City so if you're interested so you can like check out on our Twitter to see what's going on there and we also have like this program supporting like EPF permissionless developers so basically Bally EPF is like a program that uh you uh that is funded by the EF and for each summer you have like projects and you can uh ask a student or a developer to collabor with a mentor and complete a milestone in a either Foundation we also have a lot of traveler scholarships so if you are going to devcom and you have been in a public goods sector for a while you've been building some real life um um programs you can join the and apply for the scholarships we offer up to like a 500 USD uh um uh flight ticket reimbursement for those like uh people who are actually doing things in the public goods sector yeah and finally we want to introduce some of our communities that we have been um uh donating to one of the uh them is defi hack that I want to talk about they are like open source security uh GitHub project that has five over 5K get up Stars what they are basically doing is like to they're working through new uh contract developers of over all the um security problems they basically reproduce all the uh contract attacks and trying to uh teach the new developers to avoid them and using um the using this GitHub repository so they are basically attending a lot of like uh the conferences in CDF and has guided a lot of the developers through through the process so uh basically I have uh quickly walked through what we have done and we're going to the par through which I want to talk about more and maybe is this where the major roasting happens okay so first is about uh sustainability uh the most question we were asked about is like uh why should people care about public goods so in often cases a public goods is more like a showcase to the the general public that we're doing something good we're doing something useful and doing something meaningful to the public but um aside from that agenda I think there is something more essential in this concept which is like I believe public goods is also a really important source of um new users and new developers that can help us the entire ecosystem Thrive so here's why so when I was a student I actually uh I used to be a web to developer in the open source communities I used to be in the apach uh I used to contribute to several of the apach projects uh when I was a student I applied to one of the gso uh programs and I just got um selected into one of the programs and that's where my journey in the open source world begins the same is that uh for most like open source projects it's because it's permissionless even when you're unexperienced you don't have any prior knowledge you can still find a way to get involved in those areas you don't have to be a like experienced developer you don't have to have a lot of connections but in that case you can already start doing something building something in a permissionless fashion and I think that's very important in the web 3 world because um for users and builders in web 3 world there is very thick line between them so when we are talking about we want more new users more new users more adapters what we're really talking about is we want more Builders and more people who are using this technology who are understand this technology and who can collaborate with us using this technology and I think this is where the true value of public goods projects or the open source projects are is that it lowers a bar of like General um participation of the entire general um uh people um no matter it's like a coding for uh if it's open source project it can allows for like Web Two developers to get on board to the word easily so if it's like a um uh in real life uh Community for example Pagoda HED City shangu and a lot of like the pop-up cities zalo in which will is going on right now uh in chai there are offer opportunity for those people who are not familiar with the web stre world to get involved in this process so I think this is a major part where the public goods is really U not only just a fancy Forefront of the web world but also a a fundamental functioning um sector of uh helping the entire system Thrive so uh this is where I want to talk about sustainable ability is like why should people care about public goods not only because you want to okay let people know okay we are like a charity funding uh company or we did a lot of good things but what kind of good things we don't know but also you can actually help uh gaining more users developers and adapters in this whole ecosystem and that's where we're going head into so um just by quoting one of the vitalic um uh articles recently um he says that um we all should all focus on the positive sum which is like uh for all our like application Builders if we want to along with the etherum um there is something that we can do so one of them is like you can contribute to open source Technologies and commitment to donate a CER uh percentage of the tokens of your Revenue to the e ether uh ecosystem wide public is so what I think this underline means is that um it's a long-term thing uh it's it's not it's not like you put into like a 100 or thousand uh USD to a marketing program and you just instantly get like a 100 more users but this is more like okay change the a general view of the public and opening up new opportunities for them to get involved and that's where we are heading to and that's all about the sustainability and why we should care about it and the second part I want to talk about is like um scoping so there is a joke about public goods funding is that um so if you are a GU with a lot of money and you someday you start you decide to say okay uh I I want to give out money to public goods and then you will like magically find out that every project is saying we were public goods uh what I'm trying to say is that um public is really a vague definition it has a lot of like like meanings and it's uh intrinsically it's a like economic a term that is not very easy to understand it's very like professional and it has a lot of like restrictions so when we were talking about um public goods and we are refering them to uh introducing this concept to new users so we'll say okay yeah you talk a lot but what is it really so that's that's a question we have been facing for a long time so um there is so many things that uh remotely related to public goods so we don't have the ability and the effort and the capability to like funding all of them so scoping is really important so which exact part of public good funding are we funding and what are we supporting and do we believe is the most important part so there are some like preferences in uh GCC selection so the first one is we prefer infrastructure as we mentioned earlier because we found it's really um useful for for not only just the um coding communities but also the general real life communities the second part is like open source software of course um because we found it's like easily the most qualified uh definition of a public goods and third was like we focus on long-term impact and of course if that's if we focus on the first two we naturally like wants to focus on the long-term effect and the third part of like the interest in uh thing about Public Funding is like impact me measuring uh so um every metric comes with a bias in Public Funding so it depends on how you want to like evaluate them so for open source project you can have like you can evaluate on active contributors you can evaluate on like GitHub Stars you can evaluate on the lines of codes and and the uh events happening on the GitHub but that all comes up with a bias I mean this is neutral War the bias it's uh H bio stands for a set of rules or Criterion that how you want to like give uh scores to the public uh projects and the best way we can do is like okay we just can't avoid uh the this it's just not avoidable we have to uh live with it and what we can only do is like to try to improve it and accept it and announce to our like you uh the the the audiences say okay I know we not perfect but we it's trying our best to like do this so currently GC is still like in a very um comedy style thing so you just have a bunch of Voters which we call the voting committee and we're using some like qf and signal booster like voting strategies if you're not familiar with them they are just like some uh uh tricks that you can make the voting weight more reasonable that's what we are doing and aside from that there is something I really want to share that I just recently observed is like the RPG F4 uh they have adopt a new voting mechanism which is like uh instead of like voting directly on each individual projects they're actually letting the voters to choose what metrics do you prefer so this is really interesting because you do not like give a rate to each individual projects but like you can uh choose and explicitly express your preferences over the metrics for for example I give a weight of 10 to the GI up Stars I give a weight of five to the active contributors and based on those criterian you selected then you will have like a computed list of rank of all those projects and because since you don't even have the original data of the of each of the individual um projects the result is completely like hidden but it's also very um reasonable because once you choose a metrix the rank is like determined so this is a very good way for you to explic explicitly say we have bias but this is our bias and this is how we are going to meas s and that avoids a lot of problems but I won't dive in too much on that so um basically I have covered the some of my observations and some of the complaints and some of the highlights of um our past years work so here's about what's we are going to do next okay um we're going to have a gccd on during Devcon I think it's on 10th November we haven't announced yet but it's coming out really soon um we are also collaborating with some of the Chinese open source communities they are totally web to based basically we are trying to collecting some like the cases where open source Technologies or best practices are deployed into the real world Life Cases I want to demonstrate them in a conference that's happening in China Beijing uh I think it's also in November as well so uh that's some things we're doing right now so also if you want to get involved you can always recommend or you just like apply to our Grands program and you can find our Grands application entry on this website also if you want to co-host events want to have a speech want to like to share some thought just please contact us and we we can co-host in events everywhere and during Devcon also you can follow us on Twitter and there were a lot of like new informations on our program and then on our grantees and finally uh this is a QR code of our telegram channels and that's all thanks so much I want yeah thanks