Public Goods Funding Methodologies

This page contains links to public goods funding projects happening today, to research current approaches and methodologies.

Quadratic funding

• Gitcoin CLR matching

Ongoing donations to projects

• Giveth

• Open Collective

Retroactive public goods funding

• Optimism / Vitalik

• Vitalik talk - starting at 28:42

• IAMM - Impact Attribution Meta Market - an approach to rewarding the production of impactful content and digital goods. Its Impact Attribution protocol enables a supply chain for ideas. Impact-signals propagate backwards through networks of digital goods, connected by attribution links.

Social impact investing

• Investopedia

Effective Altruism

• Wikipedia

• ITN Framework for choosing focus areas:

  • 1. Importance = scale x severity

  • 2. Tractability = you can see a path forward, that putting money and time into something will produce results. Do people care about it? Are the decision makers or underlying causes moveable? Tractability is time-sensitive as well.

  • 3. Neglectedness = a cause is getting less resources than its importance and tractability would suggest it should get

Participatory Budgeting & Philanthropy

• City of Vallejo, California

  • Rulebook

• WEPOWER- To drive community-owned wealth, they build the capacity of community members to democratically control the businesses, land, and assets that exist in their neighborhoods and are a result of their labor. The decisions of what businesses the VC fund invests in are made by residents of the neighborhoods.

• Thriving Resilient Communities Collaboratory

  • Participating organizations create a criteria for funding competitions each year, to assess the best strategic moves for the regional community resilience movement as a whole.

• Femtheogen

  • Participants received training on philanthropy as a process, how to make criteria, and training from leaders in the space on topics that the facilitators decided were important, such as power dynamics, Indigenous leadership, etc. They came up with groups among themselves based on what everyone thought was important, and researched potential grantees, then interviewed them to gather more detail and vet them. Each group had 2 $10k grants to give, and they were eligible for an additional $20k of matching funding if they raised an additional $10k for their group on their own.

  • Resources on power dynamics and funding strategies

• Formulating criteria to assist project selection: Several examples | Detail example 1 | Detail example 2

Collaborative Innovation

• Bloom Network's Pollination Labs framework for interdisciplinary collaboration

• Accelerating the Accelerators