Present and future of public goods funding

Thank you. So, hello everyone and thank you for the time. And, very interesting to talk with you. Um, I am, like, Victor Veran. And here and, so we're going to be, to forget, pressing some of the modern world internet and, so, I am, like, a moderator and here I have the candidates.

And I will try to speak between the moderator and the candidates, so I will try to be more or less in-depth as well. So the rest, but they're pretty good, so. So, maybe a brief introduction of myself. And I'm Alexa. I work for the Freedom Foundation in online coordination teams.

What we do, basically, is to, um, to coordinate and accelerate, like, to understand the funding and reach support to different public groups and in the city ecosystem. And include multiple models that we kind of have and, like, okay, where the funds are allocated and how to facilitate those solutions and transparency around to different, like, groups that may be coming and, at the same time, like, trying to grow the funding systems and making them more publicly sustainable. And here, David. And here. And, so, I would really like if you can introduce yourself, David.

All right. Hey, everybody. This is David from Funding the Commons. It's really good to be back here in Tokyo and, actually, in this building where we ran a conference last year. With Hiro, who is actually more, is a lot more than our team in terms of making it happen.

So, thank you. Yeah. Thanks a lot for having me. It's a kind welcome. Yeah, thanks so much for coming in here.

My name is Hiro Okamada. I'm actually a researcher by training, and we actually hosted the Funding the Commons conference in Tokyo last year. And we had two themes. One is B-side, which is the right line, and another one is public good. And, so, yeah.

So, that's something, yeah, we really share in the budget. Awesome. So, for you, you are still from Funding the Commons? Yes. Yes.

Perfect. So, I did a little bit of research on both of you, like, what was the current situation of the project. So, I was, like, wondering, like, from your work, your work stands from, like, B-side, past ARAIDA, to the community delivery initiatives at B-side Tokyo. As we've been in this conversation on public good, what do you focus on, or how do you define scientific knowledge that is a candidate for turning into public good? Right.

Yeah. Thanks a lot. So, I think that's very important, and also confusing at the same time. Like, everybody, like, when I, when my researcher friends see me, you are doing something, like, very different stuff. And, like, public good community people see me, like, you're a scientist.

Why are you here? This kind of answer is, you can ask. It's always kind of hard to mention. But I try to, try to convey what, yeah, what my thoughts are on this. So, the reason why I'm interested in science itself, deep tech, is fundamentally that actually contributes to humanity.

That's one of my first things I'm very passionate about. And there are different kind of forms. One is, so, I had a friend, like, and I also had a depression, when I was a little bit old, and, like, a teenager. And I thought I should, like, tackle those issues that everybody, a lot of people have a hard time. So, yeah, I went to, like, universities, and I did some PhD on, like, systems neuroscience, trying to understand how we can cure depression.

That is how I ended up, like, going in the science part. But I realized that a lot of difficulties in science is about more just, like, coordinating people together to get a lot of data and how to manage the project itself. And I thought maybe, and also the funding is also the big, big problem. Like, yeah, dividing a lot of, like, grants and, like, being supposed, like, to do one very big, good project, like, you have to get a lot of funding from diverse communities is very hard work. So, I think the point is, yeah, so, I think the reason I also joined the statistical science community and tried to connect my, like, other sciences work is, yeah, so, it's a fundamentally, it's, like, contribution to the humanity.

And I'm actually now, like, I'm doing more AI research. Like, there are a lot of similarities between, like, human brains and the inter-models of AI, and we can learn some stuff. So, but, yeah, I think that there are a lot of things in the system itself. And the knowledge I have, like, more decentralized systems and, like, the human brain science, I think we can utilize as a whole, but maybe we can contribute to the humanity. That's how I ended up, like, contributing to project.

Sorry, I have to turn it off. Yeah. And do you see, like, what's the connection, or what would you say, like, the connection between ARIA and, like, in detail? Because I'm actually wondering this. Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm affiliated with ARIA. It's called, yeah, it's a company where they try to create, like, artificial consciousness. And they also work on, like, brain-machine interfaces to have, like, a new sort of communication through the brain. And when I, yeah, working on this, you know, my friends working on this brain-machine interfaces, one thing I realized is that once we get access to the brain easily, then, like, some people also are easier to hack the brain itself. So I think it will be causing a lot of danger as well.

And so I thought we need a really decentralized system, and a confidential computation, those kind of systems to protect our cognitive liberty, or cognitive, yeah, to enhance the cognitive security. That's why, like, I thought, like, maybe decentralized science, or, like, any kind of decentralized system would contribute to, yeah, to supporting cognitive security. So that's, like, besides Tokyo, it's just a community hub for, like, decentralized science to connecting lots of, like, people in the science, and also the founders, and also, like, someone who really wants to do, like, education, those kind of stuff. But fundamentally, I have a source of philosophy that's connected with ARIA and Visa, too. Awesome.

Thank you. And then for you, then, David. And whenever I need to describe the superpower of something in the commons, I always mention, like, building bridges. What are some of the most surprising factors, or points of friction you have discovered on exchange relations and philanthropy with decentralized crypto-making? Okay.

So, yeah, there's a few. We'll start with points of friction. One of them was just, like, beating me to that horse, but I'm going to say that it's user experience, user interface. Often, folks with traditional methods don't understand or aren't familiar with our systems and applications, and it's just, yeah, it's not something they're familiar with. It's not something they're comfortable with.

That's education, in part, which bridges to the second point. So education-related is that often people still associate our industry with things like that, built in 2005. So that's, again, education. You know, it's just like saying the internet has things that happen that are bad, and therefore we should care to not use it. This is an interesting one.

So traditional philanthropy and giving is around often one person or an endowment that chooses where to allocate, and decentralized allocation is pretty intimidating. Letting go of the control of where the money goes is maybe one of the biggest barriers that we've found so far, and the liability attached to that, because if you aren't choosing where the funds go, then what happens if the funds go to someone that, yeah, et cetera. So that's one thing. Let's see, what else? Language, lexicon.

We have some very different set of words that we use that are often unfamiliar, and therefore, again, that education is another one. It's just understanding how to communicate through bridges. And then I'll get to the similarities and parallels. So one is often there's a parallel in both web-free and digital philanthropy. Early, what's called venture philanthropy is basically often unrecognized and unrewarded risk taken to benefit the public good at large.

And so one of the things we think a lot about at Funding Commons is people love to fund outcomes of things that happen or things that they'll know will happen, but funding speculative philanthropy or speculative public goods that may never work out, that's a challenge. There isn't much incentive currently, and it's not often recognized. Let's see, there's one more. Yeah, I think similar issues around governance, special interests, regulatory posture. That's just something that we experience as human stability systems, but we need to translate across sectors.

Yeah, thank you. That's actually the thing that I was thinking about when you said research on public goods. So things that could be potentially foreign goods that they are not defined, or that they are not fully defined, or I don't know, that they are not fully operable. And so for example, I don't know, in programs, FPGs, that are, it's a problem in the future, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be impacting, but as I said, it's not fully developed and that's really hard to find. Thank you.

Yes, find something for those kind of issues. Yes, yes. The more speculative, the more difficult. And yeah, that brings me to one more point, which is impact sentiment, impact metrics, impact evaluation. That's a common denominator.

We often use different words, and actually traditional philanthropy and non-profit is a much more developed impact evaluation. And I think that's something that often we forget in our industry, is that we think we're inventing lots of new things, but there are many parallels in other industries that we can not repeat the same mistakes that we've made. Awesome. So now for both of you. So we just described how public goods impact the real world programs, like research and philanthropy.

Are there any more areas that will benefit from a public goods approach? Are there any of you? I'll kick it off with AI, because I think this is going to be a really good one, and then you can follow in. The GM is first. Thank you.

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