Measuring impact of open source software (Web3 + bigger picture) - Berkeley 2024

[Music] it's great to see everyone we're here because we care about open source um we think that open source is a growing and Incredibly important part of the world and as we know open source is borderless um the ways that we contribute increasingly are based on domain interest Network and not based on locality geography where you're from and so this is the the flywheel that you're trying to create you have the network funding a share taking a share of its it its Revenue into a foundation and then using that to provide funding to projects that ideally bring value back onto the network and don't need to have a fee um because they're able to rely increasingly on this form of funding to cover their operations and to grow so this is the promise um right now as in many things in crypto it might seem that this is a beautiful idea but it doesn't exist in practice the reality though is that this is actually happening and on a scale that um even I was surprised yesterday when I check the numbers there's a site called grow the P where you can actually look and see on a daily basis how much profit some of these uh networks are spinning off but in in any case these are teams that are organized independent of the network itself and they have a decision about how much time they want to focus on optimism arbitrum or any other network and then of course we can look at the developers this actually represents the the unique developers so some might be working on more than one project but each of these networks has roughly a thousand or so active developers that are that are contributing on a on a regular basis so again Point here um this is a beautiful concept but there's actually real money that is coming into these networks and they want to use that toward towards funding the projects that are having the most impact but you can see that the amount of funding that is going in um to funding these projects has been increasing pretty rapidly and already in 2024 um we're likely on place to exceed what was deployed in 2023 and then this crazy sanki diagram over here basically shows that there's a lot of projects and in many cases there are more than one fun funding the same project um it could be arbitrum and optimism both funding the same project it could be um things like gitcoin and octant which are also contributing to these uh public goods and and these uh projects we think this is a pretty powerful opportunity to combine these data sets um and in the same way that in financial markets better visibility has led to um all sorts of changes in how funding is allocated we believe the same thing is possible for open source funding and so by layering and combining these data sets indexing them so that they're more accessible we we believe that we can dramatically improve the funding outcomes and the impact that we can see on these networks there definitely are some some challenges here superficial metrics like the number of stars contributors daily active users Etc are probably pretty good at identifying both the things on the extreme end of the short tale and the long taale but the really hard work is here in the middle and finding meaningful metrics to identify the projects which are going to become the big ones of the future or the ones that are a keystone species in their ecosystem what kind of signals can we use to identify those projects and come up with good predictive metrics and ideally use that to inform the funding decisions that we make that's like a really hard problem as uh George box famously said all models are wrong some are useful um there's a a lot of work that is going to be required to search across the space and try out different models and hopefully um through governance and through being able to design a number of experiments we can find some models that are useful in in governing and improving the efficacy of these grants programs so the last part of my presentation is some of the work that lies ahead the jobs that we need right now we have people that are very excited about public goods about free and open source software and over here we have data people and there's very little overlap there's very very few people in the in the intersection of those two populations and so our goal one of the things that we we care and are passionate about is trying to build some this network of impact data scientists so people that care about impact but that also want to develop the data skills and apply that to the question of how do we fund more of the things that matter in our in our community so we need a network of impact data scientists um it's a job that doesn't exist some of the things that we think are important being able to be curious and explore different sources of data and finding ways to stack and connect that data um being rigorous and thoughtful about impact measurement and then finally we believe that like the the mission and the ideals are really important here and so we do want to attract people that care first and foremost about having an impact um and this being work that is going to change the way that we fund things and ultimately change the world thank you very much uh this is my contact information we love to hear from you and please um if you're interested join us in the Discord and help create the future of impact data science thanks [Applause] [Music]