Super excited to see Allo Protocol and Grants Stack manifest more and more. To me, it’s a really groundbreaking moment in not just public funding of public goods, but also the crowdsourcing of universal, practical, & nuanced knowledge. Several ideas come to mind:
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More Fiscal Responsibility - just riffing here, but imagine a fiscal year of quarterly rounds where future consecutive rounds only allow Buidlers that broadcast trial&error feedback on previous rounds. Could even be branches of shipppooors & feedbackooors wherein the “Managers” throttle the ratio of sponsorship for learned mistakes vs growth vs revenue.
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Endless Apprenticeship - the same cumulative logic, with onchain scaling, could be applied to smaller, more defined scopes until we see a working registry for practical, continuous “curriculums”. I see the providence of Allo Protocol, Gitcoin Passport, GitPOAP, Sismo, Safe{Core} (EIP-4337) & Aztec (among others) as a stack where anyone in the world can increasingly gain a private identity & the freedom from worry, to learn on the job & eventually discover the unknown. This is massive for academic research with a dearth of funding, but it very practically fits into the worldwide demand for IRL builders & maintainers of public infrastructure.
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Piecemeal Standardization of Physical Loci - related to the Network State thesis, at some point the underlying coordination relies on a standard of participation that is as broadly defined as possible. However, most things in need of coordination have practical nuance, sometimes with opinionation.
Allo Protocol fascinates me because Builders of Round X can be filtered from Explorers of Round Y or even Round (X - n). It stretches the imagination, but I’d like to think that eventually all 3 roles are are logical recursions within the same account, where any entity is responsible & retroactively rewarded for maintaining many flexible definitions, in a single registry, of PoW. Which leads me to the “Victory Garden” thought experiment:
First of all, I want to extend some credit to orgs like Cabin & CityDAO for exploring the possible frontier of citybuilding. I think the windfall of efficiently coordinating this sort of progress, homestead by homestead, neighborhood by neighborhood, directly leads to the network effects of much more intensive enterprises like solving climate change & exotic classes of ISRU. So (just riffing here), I’m imagining this series of cumulative rounds:
- (FY1) 1-2 months of surveying/planning for supervised agriculture. Managers allocate very little sponsorship, but broaden Passport requirements & issue POAPs for both Explorers & Builders. Goal is empowering as many buidlers to have a disciplined, onchain entrancy for low-stakes, short-term Rounds, but also allow for as many Explorers to be the common sense filter (e.g. “this project is seeking funding for growing bamboo in Antarctica”, “this project is growing corn in the Amazon”, or more reasonably, “this project is growing in tropics w/o access to pest management” or “this project is growing an orchard in a tundra”).
- Funding for early season agricultural costs with significant increase in sponsorship. For obvious reasons, I think there’s a branch here between planting season & perennials. Also, extension & staggering based on location & season. Slightly more need for Stamped Explorers.
- Funding for later season upscaling like hoop greenhouses, water pumps. By this point the Buidlers & Explorers are filtered by their investment of time & attention. At this point, a legitimate Buidler might visibly expand to be the abstraction of many contributors to the same project.
- Post-harvest, post-mortem planning & recuperation. Might be counterintuitive, but qualifying Buidlers at this point should be incentivized to get funding for repairs, education, & assorted CoL.
- (FY2) 1-2 months of surveying/planning for the scope of Round 1 + any viable upscaled on-premise resource collection (solar PV, wind, stored water, etc) + any viable, secure on-premise hardware (like running an Ethereum node, even if it’s a RaspPi). Even stricter Explorer requirements, but also a branch for Buidlers that are successful enough to be sponsors / explorers. The goal should be making repeat participants as resilient as possible without sacrificing the resiliency of the Manager.
Further Rounds are further branched, but you get the idea. the “Victory Garden” is a very simple project in the short-term, but a surgical funding mechanism for agriculture-independent economic resiliency in the longterm. the more intensive the sponsorship needs to be throughout the whole enterprise (rounds for high-value electronics, internal climate control, network trust assumption) the more Grants Stack & Gitcoin Passport can be a measure of the cost to sybil-attack, collude, or otherwise disperse the capital for a large-scale, distributed enterprise.