Funding the Commons NYC - Raw Notes

Working Groups Commons Funding
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2022-06-24

  • TALK: Ela Madej from 50y.com

    • Pre-seed and seed round investment firm
    • Name comes from an essay titled Fifty Years Hence by Winston Churchill
    • Focus is on translating ideas from academic IP to industry
      • Offer more support than just money
    • Particular focus on basic science, biological sciences
    • Seems to skip the “industrial research” or “Applied” phase? Moves straight from “Basic” to “Development”?

  • Network Goods - definition for public goods that’s orthogonal to the typical taxonomy and characteristics of public goods

    • Learn more about this definition
  • TALK: [[Juan Benet]] - Priorities for 2022 for Public Goods
    • Critical century, decade, and year
      • X-risks:
        • computing phase transition
          • (brain-machine interfaces, artificial general intelligence)
        • inadequate macro systems
        • need to develop more quickly
      • This decade: need lots of experiments to reinvent macro systems
        • right time to put in place public goods values when these systems are novel
    • [[Cryptoeconomics]]
      • “software eating mechanism design” (incentive structure
      • cryptographic primitives and economics (incentive design)
        • What are the key papers in cryptoecon?
      • use mechanism design to “warp incentive fields”
    • The origins of Funding the Commons
      • massive coordination problems
      • need new governance structures
      • trying to start a movement of like-minded individuals
      • experimenting with coordination systems
        • more experiments needed
        • Network OKRs
        • Futarchy / DAO Futarchy
      • OSS maintenance and funding
    • Juan’s goals for this year
      1. Grow the events - add domain-specific tracks
      2. Workshops and hackathons - great to meet and think together, but also need to build together
      3. FTC Network Funding - target $5M fund in support of researchers
      4. Grow community - bring in more people
      5. See the [[Impact Certificate]] market cap grow to $50m
      6. Investigate Impact Evaluators
        • Periodic evaluation of a specific value (via an indicator) from an environment
        • reward is released to all network participants
        • periodic over time
      7. Better frameworks for evaluating Performance and Benchmarks
        • Specifically needed for governance structures
        • Like test suites for computer programs

  • Sara Horowitz

    • Founder of Freelancer’s Union
    • Author of Mutualism
    • Mutualism
      • Community of shared interests
      • Self-funded, managing their own capital
      • Oriented towards long-term horizons
    • Unions are examples (paid through dues)
    • DAOs exemplify this as well

  • [[Juan Benet]] - Network Funds

    • Very similar to a talk in March at Funding the Commons
    • Capital allocation is a distributed optimization problem
      • How do we allocate and reason about the resources
        • Capitalism is a useful strategy because it works at different scales and can be locally optimized
      • It’s an n-dimensional manifold, far too complex to reason about!
        • Centralized planning will not work!
    • VC is essentially a service provider who serves to solve the capital allocation problem at a local level
      • Allocate resources to founders to bring ideas to markets
    • Need a network structure that’s composable, has feedback mechanisms, and supports back-propagation

  • Puja Olhaver - Flashbots

    • Science and OSS are related public goods
      • OSS is has low “status” legibility but high information availability
      • Science has high “status” legibility but low information availability
    • OSS is a research problem that needs coordination experiments
      • Reach out to Puja and ask “what kind of OSS experimentation did you have in mind?”

  • Read Moxie (founder of Signal)'s first impressions of web3

    • His take is that the primitives in the space are not being used well yet
  • Kate Sills
    • Agoric smart contract author
    • Worked at Foresight Institute
    • Watch “Blockchain Ed as Public Good”

  • [[Chad Fowler]]

    • Provocative Question: when will see the first “unicorn” ($1B value) with only 4 FTEs?
      • Only a “networked org” would enable this

  • GitCoin: Building The Rails for funding distributions

    • Overview of Grants 2.0
    • Building a technical infrastructure others can adopt
    • OSS, modular, decentralized grants protocol
      • test different mechanisms - spin up at will
      • decide what you care about before you put the mechanisms in place

  • [[David Dalrymple]] - Hypercerts

    • Send David’s March talk to [[Gordon Brander]]
    • The Impact Loop
      • Grab this slide from the talk
    • Tools for “collectively allocating attention for contributors”
      • Can redirect attention to the areas that most need contribution

  • [[Jon Borchovsky]] and [[Gordon Brander]] conversation

    • Watch [[Maggie Appleton]]'s recent talk on the Block Protocol
    • blot.im - turns a directory of markdown files into a gorgeous website

  • Jessy Kate - [[Extitutional Theory]]

    • Classic institutional theory is about “rules” and “roles”
    • Fails to model some interactions around institutions
    • Extitutional theory posits that “relationships” and “identities” are better models for capturing dynamics around institutions.

  • Pluralistic Social Network

    • Federated social network - mastodon
    • API that governs interactions between groups
    • Is this bluesky?

2022-06-25

  • PANEL: Measurement Systems and Contributor Rewards

    • Moderated by Michael Zargham, founder of Block Science
    • SourceCred.com - reward people for work that they are doing
      • Institutionalize the feedback that is coming in through working with the tool
      • Crucial to capture off-boarding and on-boarding knowledge over time
        • Documentation in general is very important: write down the culture
    • Ellie Rennie: ethnography of tools and communities
    • Jeff Emmett of Common Stack
      • Beware Wittgenstein’s ruler: are you using the ruler to measure the table or the table to measure the ruler.
        • According to Nassim Taleb in Fooled By Randomness
          • “Unless the source of a statement has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him. This applies to matters of judgment. According to Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler’s reliability, the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.”
    • Aaron Soskin of govrn
      • important to establish shared languages, but realize that they are not objective, universal. Rather those shared languages are bound within this subjectivity

  • Web3 Commons Learning Tools

    • Molly MacKinlay - Protocol Labs - Launchpad program
      • What offer could we be giving in advance?
    • [[Pooja Shah]] of Radius
      • Grant-based, project-based learning
      • Content library
      • Fellowship
      • In terms of funding structures, we should be experimenting with things like the ISA from web3

  • TALK: Mark Miller

    • Watch this talk
    • Read “Gaming the Future”
    • Pareto-preferred
    • Credible commitment technologies
      • Historically have been very important: reputation, promises, contracts
      • Blockchain is actually a technology for solving collective action problems

  • WORKSHOP: Science Funding

    • Organized by [[Pooja Shah]] and Darren
    • SpaceTime - decentralized database
    • Discourse Graphs - probably worth reading about
    • Experiment.com - trying out new things in funding scientists
      • They do “grants” and “micro-grants”
      • Looking for new kinds of experiments to run
      • Interested in “dynamics over mechanics”, whatever that means
    • Research has three broad phases: Basic → Applied → Development
    • Cooperative Game Theory
      • Levi from OpenRosetta
        • OpenRosetta is working on prediction markets, paper coming soon
    • CADCAD/Gauntlet are tools for testing out mechanism design
    • Bargaining on Networks - read
      • Reviews need to be based on accurate information
    • Core question of Cryptoeconomic mechanism design: “How do you ensure that everyone gets what they deserve?”
    • Look into guy I met through Lambda applying free2play ideas to build automated tooling for monitoring and adapting
      • Papers on how free2play game designers monitor the system / economy?

  • Michael Zagreb

    • Algorithms and Policy
    • Creation and maintenance of open source software
    • Look into NumPy and NumFocus, the org that manages NumPy
      • Ask Michael for an intro to talk to them about OSS?
    • Funders still expect to get “the oven” when they are investing
      • Must provide clarity on goals / stages / deliverables
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