A Vision for A Pluralistic Civilizational Scale Infrastructure for funding Public Goods

owocki · December 24, 2021, 4:45pm

EDIT May 2023: This post is now available as a youtube video or twitter thread

The objective of this post is to articulate how ImpactDAOS on Ethereum could scale to support all different types of public goods.

I envision a Public Goods Rebel Alliance that grows to build, fund, and maintain all sorts of public goods. Such an alliance would be a pluralistic, global, decoupled, & decentralized public goods funding juggernaut (as opposed to our legacy infrastructure which is comprised of (1) nation-state governments which is highly coupled + only serves the public goods of its citizens & (2) NGOs, which are high administrative overhead and generally dependent upon large donors ).

I believe that the internet of money is the fundamental paradigm shift that enables the creation of this infrastructure.

Just as anything that relied upon information was deeply changed by the original internet, I believe that the internet of money will enable a deep structural change in how value transfer occurs in society. While most of the digital asset market is focused on banking (DeFi) and art (NFTs), I remain focused on long tail use cases like The Internet of Jobs and digital public goods.

We are early. I do not have all of the questions answered and do not claim to. Instead, this post is merely a sketch of how I see several pieces of scaffolding coming together.

Vision: A Pluralistic Civilizational Scale Infrastructure for funding Public Goods

There are existential risks that the nation-state public good architecture is not well set up to handle.

Climate change is a global existential risk that is not bounded to any nation.
Misinformation is a global existential risk that is not bounded to any nation.
Underfunded Digital Infrastructure is a global existential risk that is not bounded to any nation.
There are many many others: nuclear proliferation, environmental risks like deforestation or pollution, resource shortages, etc.

These challenges are what keep me coming back to work on these problems. On a very deep level, I don’t want to live in a world where these challenges dominate my life or the lifes of my loved ones.

We should provide an infrastructure that is global in scope, which can address these unmet challenges.

But how?

This is why I think that programmable blockchains, especially Ethereum are so important. They are a meaningful, incorruptible, programmable, substrate for global coordination. And because they have got the future of finance riding on their rails, they could be incredibly powerful.

There are many meaningful things happening on blockchain systems that are worthy of our time and attention, but my focal point for this discussion is on DAOs. DAOs, for the purpose of this post, I will define broadly as “digital organizations”. They are a group of people with a shared bank account and shared purpose.

There are 100s of DAOs out there and many many different sub-types of DAOs. A particular type of DAO that I think is interesting and important is an ImpactDAO. An ImpactDAO is any DAO that provides a positive externality, especially positive externalities for the public (not captured by any group).

I believe that these ImpactDAOs are the fundamental atomic building block for the movement towards supporting digital public goods. Towards a Pluralistic Civilizational Scale Infrastructure for funding Public Goods.

Some examples of ImpactDAOs:

Proof Of Humanity creates the public good of more sybil resistance, which could usher in a world of one-human-one-vote digital democracy.
KlimaDAO creates the public goods of funding for those doing important carbon capture work.
GitcoinDAO creates the public good of funding for other public goods.
There are many more examples, these are just a few.

What I think is interesting about these ImpactDAOs can stack upon each other. For example, an ImpactDAO for funding carbon credits, relies on our Ethereum infrastructure, which relies upon our broader digital infrastructure.

And it is upon this insight that we build our stack of an unbundled public goods funding infrastructure.

If you as a developer who is working on an ImpactDAO can focus on your own discrete mission, you can

create positive externalities to the world.
create positive externalities up the ImpactDAO stack, especially to projects that rely upon you.
benefit from positive externalities down the ImpactDAO stack.

This isnt merely hypothetical. Gitcoin has delivered $50mm in public goods funding so far. In Gitcoin Grants Round 12, we begun to expand upon our side rounds strategy. GR12 contained.

a main Ethereum round for funding Ethereum public goods
an advocacy round for funding digital advocacy projects.
a longevity round for funding life longevity projects.
a climate round for funding life climate change projects.
several rounds for adjacent ecosystems to fund their public goods: Forefront, Polygon, Uniswap, Zk Privacy, etc…

What i think is super cool about this is how the Quadratic Funding Matching can stack when a grant is in multiple rounds. If a $1 donation would generate a $75 matching donation for a grant in the main pool, then the same grant in 3 pools could have a $1 donation generate a $500 matching donation.

This in fact did happen for Coin Center during GR12. The matching multiple was so good that the twitterati though it was too good to be true.

This is an extremely powerful primitive! If each QF matching pool is like a fan, then the combination of several matching pools together is like a jet engine!

Of course, Quadratic Funding is not the only game in town. Nor should it be.

I do not think this post would be legitimate if I was not advocating for a Pluralistic Infrastructure for funding Public Goods.

Just as ETH2 client diversity is important, I believe that public goods funding mechanism diversity is important too!

So lets talk about the ingredients that make ImpactDAOs legitimate and meaningful. I am of the belief that there are two main ingredients.

a funding source
and a mechanism for allocating attention and resources to places where they have impact.

There are many meaningful ImpactDAOs out there that provide mechanisms for creating impact. Some of the ones I’m most excited about are noted in the slides below (but there are many many more!)

Zooming back out - when we return to our view of how public goods can stack, let us note the diversity of mechanisms and funding sources that can make up a cluster of ImpactDAOs.

Zooming further out, let us again note that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Dozens of diverse ImpactDAOs standing upon each other are greater than the whole of their composite parts.

From here, we can begin to sketch an architecture of how our nascent Ethereum-based public good can begin to scale to a pluralistic civilizational scale public goods funding infrastructure.

As Marc Andresson once said, “Software is eating the world”. In a world increasingly intermediated by (and coordinated by) software, this is a tailwind for deploying a novel & foundational infrastructure for funding public goods to the world.

With these tailwinds, we can begin to think about how Ethereum-based public goods, which are starting to generate a lot of heat, could begin to expand to positively affect things outside of our nascent ecosystem.

Because of how these ImpactDAOs stack and force multiply (remember - one QF round is like a fan, many is like a jet engine), and because each ImpactDAO is forkable to be used in different domains, we begin can to envision how ImpactDAOs could proliferate to traditional OSS, to all digital projects, and possibly to impact the global scale public goods problems we noted in the beginning.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that this is a future that we collectively have to choose. The market will decide if it cares about ImpactDAOs or not. Perhaps the market will choose that it only cares about Degen type use cases.

All coordination is a choice. We have to choose this future, not only in the types of assets we support in our financial lifes, but also in where we put our scarce time, attention, and skills.

My goal with writing this post (and with much of the other work Gitcoin is doing) is to create a stigmergic feedback loop which helps to increase the chances of addressing the challenges outlined at the top of the post…

I envision a web-scale public goods funding infrastructure replacing some of the places where nation states are receding in their support for public goods (or were never good at supporting public goods in the first place). in the old world, public goods were oriented around nation state. in the new world, they’ll be based upon your online niche/community you belong to. were in the middle of a great re-indexing from nation-states to niches. niches are the new nation-states insofar as as this public goods funding spreads outward, niches (not geography) will be the aqueduct that carries the liquidity outward to the world.

I want to end on a pragmatic note, and acknowledge to you that there are risks and other unsolved problems here.

I don’t exactly have this all figured out yet, but I am only to provide a scaffold of an architecture that could begin to solve these problems.

Here are some problems/risks I think we should be mindful of.

You should be wary of any charismatic leader who claims to have the answers, including myself. Do your own research, form your own opinions, ask the hard questions. Do not accept arguments from authority.
How we make collective decisions to value these problems and the solutions to them is an extremely high order bit. How does a market of participants decide to value climate action vs digital infrastructure vs fighting misinformation? I am worried that markets of participants follow things that are lower in the brainstem (charismatic leaders, memes, and brands) moreso than rationalist things like fundamentals.
We are awash in mechanisms to organize attention & financial resources (like Quadratic Funding), but we do not yet have sustainable financial resources to fund ImpactDAOs. I know this challenge first hand as I hustle ever quarter to get more capital into the Gitcoin Grants matching pools. Maybe one day nation-state governments will realize these ImpactDAOs are more effective and lower overhead than their predecessors and take revenues from taxation and put them into these mechanisms. But until that day I will continue to hustle.
I worry a lot about The Matthew Effect, the fundamental law of economic systems that says that the “rich get richer”. We need to find a way to defy this law of economic systems lest this infrastructure become captured by the elite, just like the infrastructure that preceded it was.
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To an Blockchain Developer, everything looks like a problem money can solve. I think we should be mindful that there is meaningful organic local action happening in many niches, and our job is to play a supporting role in amplifying the impact of these local leaders. The financial system is a enabling channel for greater combinations of strength/intelligence to arise, not an end in itself.
Many of the existing mechanisms are Keynesian beauty contests. Mechanisms which are not Keynesian beauty contests will be important components of this infrastructure.
What did I miss? feel free to add constructive critique of this piece in the comments.

owocki · December 24, 2021, 6:06pm

one challenge i’m having is articulating this vision in one paragraph or less. most people won’t read a post as long as the above, so whats the one-word or one-idea way to express this?

here is one attempt at meme-ing this post for consumption by the wider internets:

i’d welcome other submissions

sidcode · December 25, 2021, 12:35am

Let’s get the meme out of the way

Great vision, thanks Kevin! Public Goods funding has become the Stone Soup that is inviting all sorts of radical mechanisms mentioned that can act as massive force multipliers when combined. Looking forward to these Impact legos making a squadratic impact!

ManuAlzuru · December 28, 2021, 11:45pm

@owocki thank you for sharing this. This is so aligned with our thesis at DoinGud and I can’t wait to align what we are doing with Giveth and also with Gitcoin.

Within the next few weeks, we will focus on optimizing the creator and collector journey, and then we will be able to start thinking about possible integrations.

zach.mx · January 5, 2022, 11:57pm

Hey Kevin, great post. I have a lot of thoughts about what you’ve shared, but I think before I get into them, since I’m new here, it’s worth mentioning that I’m a Musician and Film maker first and foremost who just happens to have a deep passion for the ideas of decentralization. Right now, I find myself agreeing with everything you’ve outlined in your vision here, but I do think you shouldn’t be too quick to write off NFTs in the art portions of the crypto space. Reason being, is that part of me believes that there is some potential in combining what they’re bringing to the table, with what you’re bringing to the table.

Because of this belief, the idea of DAO alliances is something that I find really compelling and have actually already been thinking about lately, though, mostly from the opposite perspective. AKA- How to kickstart an art DAO that generates enough revenue so that it can send royalties to projects like Gitcoin or other DAOs that are similarly focused on funding Public Goods.

Art DAOs are obviously very very fresh to this world of Crypto and are inspiring an immense amount of hype (as well as money). But, I think what they currently lack is the proper infrastructure tools to become extremely large and more than that, I think they’re lacking some sort of tangible externally facing goods that could potentially bring in a very decent amount of revenue.

Right now, I’m working with a small group of people to kickstart a DAO (which I will leave unnamed since I’m more-so here to bounce ideas), and I am currently stewing on this idea representing memberships via Harberger Taxed NFTs. Otherwise known as SALSA/Cost. My theory is that if an ArtDAO manages to build out some of the tooling/infrastructure where access to the community and community resources is token gated via Harberger Taxed NFTs, the DAO can potentially drive a tremendous amount of revenue to their treasury.

This treasury then going on to fund more art which increases it’s asset pool by which it can then create a demand with and drive NFT taxed Memberships. What I find more interesting in this idea, is that like software, art is limitless and it’s a thing that people are creating endlessly for free already. So by building a community and collectivizing the ownership of the art, whether it be film, music, paintings, writings, you are creating a giant pile of assets that will generate royalties for as long as there are people to consume it.

I’ll even go as far as to say that, maybe art is a public good and should be treated as such. When you do that, you can potentially flip your Keynesian beauty contest on its head and raise funds through a multitude of ArtDAOs that are streaming revenue to the larger alliance of ImpactDAOs.

Make the fun stuff and let that fun stuff drive the funding for deeper public works? If this is something that seems possible, it needs to happen as soon as possible so a cultural precedent can be set that furthers this movement of Public Goods Funding mechanisms.

note- if this is super in the wrong lane, let me know. But I do believe that in the same way there is interdependence with people there is also interdependence in markets.

owocki · January 6, 2022, 5:17am

hey, thanks for stopping by and writing the thoughtful response you did.

to be clear, i dont “write off” art daos, its just not an area of focus for me. i’ve been watching the NFT movement from the outside in ( well actually, we have been playing with some NFT launches here at gitcoindao a la this and this), and i think its extremely cool that artists have a new vessel to capture some of the value they create.

good luck with your art dao! harberger is a cool mechanism.

zach.mx · January 6, 2022, 7:02pm

Gotcha, sorry for misinterpretation on the art bit. Either way, I whole heartedly agree with your vision and am hoping that future DAOs are able to redirect some treasury funds into the “Alliance”. I very much appreciate all the hard work Gitcoin is doing because you all are really laying the groundwork to inspire and facilitate future projects in the space!

owocki · January 8, 2022, 10:11pm

Just wanted to double click on this portfion of the post in case it was passed over.

In the past, trust flowed in local communities.
In the present, trust flows in niche online communities.

Niches are the new nation states. Ergo, public & social good funding will flow outward via niches as the aqueduct that carries the liquidity to the people/projects that need/deserve it.

Fishbiscuit · January 10, 2022, 10:52am

I envisioned it as a sort of Amazon-type of flywheel except its that funding project building public goods > positive externalities > more people can work on public goods > more funding > funding project building public goods

so it seems what’s sort of missing is that the positive externalities need to translate into more people being able to work in public goods vs creating more OSS that other people can use to make profit off. I guess that falls into the idea of regenerative economics, how can OSS capture some of that $2trillion in value + showing more people that you CAN work in public goods and not have to starve.

Don’t Starve Together: Regen Economics Edition

nollied · January 11, 2022, 5:29am

a combination of:

“the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

and

“positive-sum game”

GlenWeyl · January 30, 2022, 11:04pm

Kevin,
There’s a lot to love about your vision and obviously I am a huge fan of it. I hope GitCoin will become one of the most important models in the world for coordination and I hope to be there right along side you helping you figure it out.
In that spirit of supporting you all, I think there are some key things about the best (most socially beneficial, most scalable and most profitable) business model for GitCoin that this post doesn’t do a great job of capturing. It runs to the core of the post, because it relates to the way that it misses the essence of plurality and what it means to relate as a part of a plural infrastructure. I think this arises from falling into certain conceptual traps that are very common in the blockchain world and that I hope you can move beyond to achieve your ambitions.
Let me start by trying to illustrate why I don’t think the vision literally as you sketched is realistic or desirable. Then I’ll turn to a trajectory that makes more sense and try to sketch how the technology and business strategy needs to evolve to follow that trajectory.
Let’s imagine that we tried to run QF/GitCoin on a truly global scale based on an open PoH identity system. Let’s divide how this could play out into a few cases:

You manage to get a large chunk (let’s say 50%) of the world population actively participating. In this case, it seems very likely that there will be at least public good (say related to climate) that will get at least a $1 contribution from at least (say) a billion people, given that even without matching some disasters have elicited responses of this magnitude. QF “wants” to match this will a quintillion (10^18) dollars, so even if you had a constrained multiplier of 1/10,000, you’d still need to raise more money than all of global GDP to do this, and in the process you’d end up with a multiplier that made matching basically useless to any normal cause. In short, a global QF process is simply infeasible.
Furthermore, even if you managed to somehow make the math compute and get control of most of the world’s resources (neither of which seems desirable or feasible), the allocation of these resources would almost certainly be decided by which existing organizations in the world have the greatest combination of coercive power and internalized solidarity…China, for example, which has much higher social cohesion that liberal democracies and more surveillance powers would almost certainly manage to an order of magnitude more contributors and an order of magnitude higher contributions to any cause it favored, capturing essentially all matching funds. Now, in principle one could imagine policing such “collusion”, and I’ll return to this below, but given the sheer array of potentially “colluding” groups in the world, doing this by hand rather than by basic changes to the architecture of QF would force GitCoin to become precisely the kind of centralized surveillance state it abhors. And hoping for a world without organizations of solidarity other than through QF seems both entirely vain and deeply contrary to a spirit of pluralism that seeks to build on the accomplishment of existing means of coordination, not replace all of them.
You don’t managed to get a large chunk participating (say less than 1%). In this case, Proof of Humanity is of almost no use in deterring Sybil attacks. While it ensures each person gets only one vote, 99% of the planet is available to be recruited by an actual participant to create an effective fake account for them. One would then be stuck with either a ridiculously small matching pool that wouldn’t attract such attacks or being sucked dry by Sybil attacks.
You’re in the 1-50% range. In this intermediate range you’d end up with a mix of the first two problems.
In short, the basic set up of QF/GitCoin cannot and should not scale in an open, PoH based way globally. This doesn’t mean there isn’t something awesome going on here that should scale, and I’ll return to it soon. But it does mean something quite a bit stronger than the first reaction a lot of the audience here is likely to have:
These issues are not a result of a flaw in QF as a solution to the decentralized public goods framed as coordinating individual self-interest towards common goods. QF is the optimal solution here and anything else based on the same open, PoH, individualistic thinking is going to run into the same mix of problems: either it will be too weak to do much, be open to Sybil attacks or eat up the whole world/be controlled by existing coordination mechanisms.
In fact, these issues apply, albeit in somewhat less extreme forms, to other applications of PoH. Let me give two examples. If you try to do validation by PoH, either you are going to need like 50% of the world running validation nodes, which seems wildly unrealistic, or you’re going to be open to Sybil attacks by people recruiting large numbers of those who aren’t currently running nodes. If you try to do UBI by PoH, either you’re going to need a large chunk of global GDP and/or the payments are going to be so small they will only make a difference in the lives of the poorest people on earth, who anyway are extremely likely to be subject to some form of coercion or unable to access their PoH-based account in the first place. The open PoH approach makes it impossible to, as other UBI studies have done, target some local community with large UBIs without requiring control over a large fraction of global resources.
What’s going wrong here and what does it tell us about how to do things better? Fundamentally, the framing of the problem is missing a key element. It assumes that it finds individuals in an atomized state, caring only about their individual self-interest, without any institutions that can help solve free rider/public goods problems. It then provides incentives to overcome these. Yet, if we really lived in a world like this, civilization would pretty much not exist and we’d be in a Hobbesian war of each against all. Thankfully we don’t; there are a range of institutions (yes, I used that taboo word) at a range of scales, both formal (like governments, unions, corporations, etc.) and informal (like feelings of patriotism, altruism, kin ties, racial solidarity, etc.) that avoid this outcome, and there always have been from the dawn of humanity. Because these institutions exist, the problem of coordinating a billion people is not really a million times harder than the problem of coordinating a thousand people, as the atomized QF approach assumes. It is probably closer to being on logarithmic scale (say 6 times harder).
Now you can think what you will of these institutions and how well they perform their assigned roles and I know that most in this community will tend to dismiss them out of hand. But even if you don’t love them, you cannot ignore them for three reasons:
Practical: Even if you don’t like these institutions, there’s little to no chance they are going to completely disappear soon enough that GitCoin and other things in the Web 3 space can safely ignore the impacts they have on behavior. If you do, you are simply solving the wrong problem, potentially with catastrophic effects as noted above.
Ethical: It would be the height of arrogance to imagine that we are confident QF or any other Web 3 mechanism will always and everywhere lead to better coordination than these existing institutions without even experimenting with them significantly. Thus, we should not want to wipe out these other institutions, if ever, at least until we’ve had a chance to play with these mechanisms in a range of setting of increasing ambition. But as we do, we had also better hope these existing institutions don’t collapse, or we’ll end up in Mad Max along the way. Thus, we must plan to coexist and even cooperate with them, not for the world after they disappear. And if you really believe in pluralism like you suggest, that pluralism should be far broader than just “other stuff floating around the blockchain ecosystem”…there are more things in Heven and Earth, Kevin, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Stability: Even if, somehow, you did end up in a world where all other institutions disappeared and QF ran everything, you wouldn’t stay there long. The whole point of QF is to form cooperative communities. And one of the most reliable features of human social psychology is the tendency to form bons of affection and solidarity with those you engage in a common project with. So the minute you start running QF, you will see “institutions” form, as a result of the mechanism itself, and these will then undermine the operation of QF as noted above.
Ok, so, Mr. Gloomy Face, riddle me this: how has QF/GitCoin not turned into a disaster so far? And is there any path to scaling it successfully?
I would submit that the success of GitCoin so far has been largely due to the mismatch between the way this post imagines GitCoin and the way it operates in practice. It is not really a global open system. Instead, it has operates in specific communities, of similar scales, that roughly approximate the members thereof having nearly symmetrical social distance and the administrator having sufficient knowledge of the community structure to use various bespoke mechanisms to police “collusion” (viz. solidarity outside the mechanism), as well as potential Sybil attacks not just in terms of non-humans, but also people who don’t belong in the community and are being roped in just to help someone win.
But while this closes one avenue for growth for GitCoin, I think it opens another that is even more exciting. All around the world there are organizations and institutions like those mentioned above that a) want to see a better, more responsive and dynamic provision of public goods within them, b) lack information about which goods have the greatest value and c) know quite a bit about social structure internally which would allow them to police the way GitCoin has in the domains it knows. A natural business model is to create a 3-sided market between donors, sponsors and projects within a range of these institutions to strengthen them rather than replace them. For example, most companies have major problems with different divisions with diverse objectives and KPIs failing to provide common infrastructure that supports the company wholistically (my office at Microsoft largely exists for this reason). If QF could be thoughtfully applied, say, to representatives of these divisions, it could surface the needs for shared infrastructure.
Does any of this require or even comport very well with a blockchain? Not particularly. Given that the intention is not to have something that is global or open even in the PoH sense, where identity is deeply bound to community and most naturally to accounts that the company has already, the overhead associated with blockchains doesn’t seem to be a very good fit. But, at some level, who cares: you have a great business model that can do all kinds of good. Don’t get overly committed to a particular tech stack.
Now, eventually, you should want to go beyond these specific applications to specific communities if you can get them to work; you should seek, say, local or state governments that want to subsidize the creation of public goods across local communities, companies, etc. within the locality or state. These somewhat larger entities will have some read on community structure, but probably a not to easily directly police issues around collusion, participation, fake accounts etc. So, you will want algorithmic structure to help do all this.
But the basics of QF won’t even come close to getting you there. First, PoH won’t do much to police the boundaries of participants, as the community will be a tiny fraction of the world and you’ll need some “proof of community/membership/authority”. Second and even more importantly, membership of that community won’t be the primary thing you want to track anyway…you’ll want to be able to reduce matching for common projects between those who already are coordinating: those in the same companies, same ethnic group, same religion, etc. But even with PoH or something of that sort, you’re not going to get rich community information like that and algorithms to run on it. That’s a big step from where we are. I have an essay (“Why I am a Pluralist”) coming out soon about how it might all work in open standards, and my piece on the RxC blog on Intersectional Social Data hints at it. But it would certainly be as big a break from the current “Web 3 ecosystem” as that is from Web 1, Web 2 or perhaps even pre-internet world.
Perhaps this all sounds a bit daunting…perhaps it is. But it is also exciting and suggests that GitCoin and the space it is cracking the door of is even more important and ambitious than you suspect. I truly believe this type of thinking can transform and empower every person and organization on the planet, that it is core to our future and that we’ve just started to imagine how it might all work. Think, for example, of how we can do QF over time with those alive now, those that have died and those that will live in the future to address the long-term future of humanity?
You’ve got the Apple IIc. It portends a revolution. But not far down the road are the GUI, the internet, mobile computing, etc. Keep and open mind. Not all the answers are even imaginable now. But if you do, GitCoin has a real chance to change the world.

Best,
Glen

M0nkeyFl0wer · January 31, 2022, 4:51am

So in short we should focus on applying QF to a wide range of communities as opposed to taking a global approach.

Perhaps ultimately such a network would evolve into a global coordination network organically as communities effectively using QF internally spread?

Do you see a role for quadratic voting amongst representatives from stakeholder groups and within those groups in such a scenario?

nollied · January 31, 2022, 6:13am

i’m confident that decentralized identity (DID, a.k.a PoH in your terms) can function as a measure of impact much better than any social heuristic we have as humans in the web. not everyone needs to “run a node” for PoH to be valid… in fact, sybil seeds are much easier to detect in practice than you might think (so long as the data is available). point is, not all sybil scores need to be globalized — some forms of verification are more valuable to certain contexts. think about it — if you show up to a SWE interview with a resume for botany, of course it’s going to look impressive… but it means nothing to the interviewer unless you can prove you can code. so that sheet of paper is really only useful for you to get in the door maybe. and a great looking fraudulent resume would get them to take you more seriously — but if you don’t have the skillz to back it up… it will be very evident (to keen eyes).

a good example of a contextual DID; github profiles paired with technical interviews. how are humans recruited for fully remote tech companies? …reputation & validation (ignoring that gpt3 can beat most coding interviews, that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms). bring this github profile to a construction job and they’re gonna say “i don’t care, do you know how to use a hammer?”.

also the problems you illustrate as a composite of collusion, sybil accounts and coordination/mob-mantality voting policies, can be addressed by the funding infrastructure/methods our squad in FDD (matrix) is working on building/simulating:

we’re still actively researching (and just these 2 links doesn’t sum it all up), but it does hit most of the marks you’re pointing out with pragmatism.

side note — quadratic funding of pooled resources when 1 billion people donate >$1 to a single project doesn’t mean that $1B+ squared needs to be funded to that project. something like a matching cap has been introduced by gitcoin to combat this type of problem. it’s not a perfect solution, but in this circumstance that public good gets an extreme amount of funding… $1B + some change (the amount from the pool)… still VERY significant (come on, $1B unmatched is a dream…), and leaves a ton more room for other grants to get a slice of the pie. it’s not ideal, but iteratively solveable. this is exactly why kevin calls for a diversity of funding mechanisms, he even says that not all communities should use QF… there’s value in diversity.

UBI also might not be universal to all identity holders (at least not in the level of compensation). i think context here is also massively important. UBI payouts from a pool of money for something specific (like FDD in gitcoin) and relative to those who contribute the most (with a fair measure) only makes sense. but that’s why opt-in communities is where this type of thing will find its home — it will emerge. not be forced as a “here’s a perfect solution, now use it” (ie. what non-opt-in systems like governments/municipalities/etc. provide).

GlenWeyl · January 31, 2022, 1:47pm

In short, yes. I think what you’re saying is the right direction of travel. Much more specificity will require much greater length and research…hope to be churning that out with colleagues in coming months and years.

GlenWeyl · January 31, 2022, 1:50pm

I don’t entirely disagree…almost any paradigm, however mismatching the reality it tries to model, can be kludged to fit it and get by. That’s not really the point. The point is that paradigms are successful and impactful to the extent they match reality and don’t have to be twisted seventeen ways to avoid collapse. Let’s make some fundamental progress to get QF there and let’s focus on communities until we do.

nollied · January 31, 2022, 9:43pm

haha good point, i definitely missed the mark.

we are also working to re-evaluate the definition of optimality the paper cites at the end of section 3.3 (since that’s what the assumption the paper relies entirely upon).

is this in essence what you mean?

GlenWeyl · January 31, 2022, 10:11pm

A part but not all. The whole framework is limited. Blog post coming soon and will discuss at Schelling.

owocki · February 1, 2022, 5:06am

Thanks for coming by to comment Glen! Thankful to you for the original QF paper + the continued dialogue about its implemented + excited to read your critique

Right now we are using Pairwise QF which scales O(n^2). We are already having scaling issues with computing it. cc @gdixon

it is an interesting, if depressing, point that at this type of scale, collusion is basically impossible to deter.

id’ be curious what you think the optimal sybil resistence tool is.

one idea we’ve been toying with at Gitcoin is not betting too hard on one sybil resistence tool, instead trying to aggregate many of them - which allows for a pluralism of sybil resistence tools (and possibly force multiplication for users who verify with multiple mechanisms)

this actually reminds me, and apologies, this is unrelated to your point in any way, but the grants rounds are actually already consolidating towards the top grants. this excellent graph by @Snowdot shows the trendline:

i am curious what you think of this trendline, and ways the mechanism could be tweaked to change it if it is undesirable.

I would agree that we are not in this state in the physical world; but I’d be curious for your perspective on if the digital world looks like this in any way. my own take: I dont see things like national pride, civic cuty, or common sense of awe & stewardship for humanity in the digital realm (yet), and i see lots of small scale warfare on social media, to large scale misinformation/hacking campaigns. our digital institutions (FAANG companies, standards bodies like the w3c) are relative immature relative to our physical ones IMHO.

i know that i am seen as a crypto person, and crypto people are famously soveirgn-individual-style bearish on institutions, but i should be explicitly clear that i do not view QF as a replacing existing institutions - only augmenting them. in the digital world where there are less global public goods funding mechanisms, there is more blue ocean for Gitcoin Grants to grow. and it is there that is our primary focus for the time being…

This is a great point. Pluralism should extend not only to many web3-era mechanisms, but to many other types of institutions. I know that you and I are both very inspired by what Audrey Tang, the digital minister of Taiwan is up to. Perhaps that is a tangible example of this – though there are likely many others.

It is interesting to think of QF as a self-terminating system in this way. eg. once it creates enough cooperation, the that cooperation naturally ossifies, and it turns to collusion.

this reminds me, the theory of social distance you told me about ~ 6 months ago with respect to QF is fascinating, i bet the audience here (especially the Fraud Defense workstream) would get a kick out of it too.

What a fascinating insight. So in this world, we would be doing data analysis on the say, Ethereum ecosystem, and delivering insights back to the ecosystem steward (in this case, the Ethereum foundation) on the social structures of it’s ecosystem? cc @annika @kyle @lthrift - this reinforces my view that analytics is an underinvested area for us

Blasphemy! /s

yes, we are already experimenting with graph analysis tools in order to understand these social graphs. cc @danlessa

interesting TLDR @M0nkeyFl0wer

GlenWeyl · February 1, 2022, 7:08pm

I basically agree with everything you said in response. Happy to talk more if it helps and am writing up a post to come out soon on Pluralism that is about the next directions I see on all this.

nollied · February 1, 2022, 7:40pm

could you link your new post here once it’s uploaded? also, i was totally unaware you were an author on the QF paper. I’m very interested to see what this other framework looks like.