Seeking perspectives on Gitcoin funding + governance for digital nation research

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
2

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:

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