Seeking perspectives on Gitcoin funding + governance for digital nation research

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

I’m Madison, a research fellow at Plumia studying how digital contribution and funding mechanisms could inform tax and public goods systems for a digital nation. I’m looking at Gitcoin as an example because it has developed governance structures for funding intangible public goods, which is something directly relevant to how a digital nation might operate.

I’d love to hear from people who’ve participated in Gitcoin (as builders, donors, reviewers, stewards, etc.) about their perspectives on funding public goods within this community. I’m doing a lot of reading on existing structures and systems, but value the perspectives of individuals who’ve seen and been involved in how things work in practice. Note that I’m new here, so if there are other places of existing discussion I should read first that I may have missed, happy to go there instead. Also, happy to chat individually, just send me a message.

Here’s the questions that I have, feel free to respond to any that resonate, or share something else related:

  1. What role have you played in Gitcoin, and what motivated you to get involved?

  2. What value have you gotten from participating (funding, reputation, connections, learning, governance influence, etc.)?

  3. In your experience, what criteria or characteristics do grant rounds actually use to determine if something qualifies as a “public good”? Do those criteria make sense to you?

  4. Who benefits from the projects that typically get funded? Are there certain types of beneficiaries or use cases that seem prioritized?

  5. How do you or others assess whether funded projects created real impact?

  6. What’s been hardest about participating? If you could change one thing about how public goods projects are funded or evaluated, what would it be?

2 Likes
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Hi, Madison,

  1. I’ve been a DAO steward and domain expert for collusion resistance for the Quadratic Funding protocol. I got involved because I believe that public goods are underfunded, and I love that Gitcoin takes that problem seriously.

  2. I’ve gotten funding for BrightID, learned from hands-on experience with funding rounds, met amazing people, had philosophical discussions around funding, and gotten to test out my own and other peoples’ funding mechanisms and adjacent tooling. In short, Gitcoin has been the premier testing ground for public goods funding, and I think this is only going to ramp up with Gitcoin 3.3.

  3. I would like to move away from being rigid about what is a “public good” and instead judge what is important to humanity as a metric that is orthogonal to “does it have a business model.” Let’s find mechanisms that allow us to fund all beneficial things, and builders can decide independently whether or not it makes sense to sell something. I’ve heard arguments around here that all public goods should find a way to eventually fund themselves (become self-sustaining) and arguments that public goods are not allowed to fund themselves or they’re not really public goods. I take a middle-road stance. I’m very interested in mechanisms that decouple discovering the social value of inventions from selling them. The inventing + selling combo has gotten us this far, but I think we’re reaching an inflection point where to progress even further, we need to switch the emphasis to creating lasting value, while rewarding people for identifying value, again, separately from selling or begging for donations. I launched the Updraft mechanism this year to explore this separation.

  4. There has been a huge variety in what gets funded here, and it’s one of the best aspects of Gitcoin. The benefit is pretty close to universal, short of perhaps a universal dividend (which I’d actually like to see coupled as a side-effect of public goods funding).

  5. For impact assessment, look into what Karma is doing. There is a lot of room for study and experimentation.

  6. What’s been hardest about participating? If you could change one thing about how public goods projects are funded or evaluated, what would it be?

    There have been let downs, but that’s expected from an org that’s heavy on the side of experimentation like Gitcoin.

    If I could change one thing, it would be how people are rewarded for participation. I want anyone to be able to “co-own” an idea and have earning potential just by locking some funds to say “yes this is valuable.” Being able to identify early what ideas are going to be beneficial is useful work that all of us can do, and I want a system that pays for that.

More links to Updraft: