Downtown Stimulus: Public Goods Funding for Main St by Kevin Owocki | Devcon SEA

welcome [Music] Kevin Hello friends what's up I'm Kevin aukee I'm one of the co-founders of gitcoin has anyone in the audience used gitcoin all right can't see it on the live stream but a bunch of hands went up uh I'm going to talk about bringing the getcoin model of quadratic funding to Main Street so how do we exit our little crypto bubble and start to do more public goods funding downtown so if you've been in the etherium ecosystem over the last couple years you know that quadratic funding is a democratic way to run a public goods funding campaign if you are an ecosystem that wants to fund your ecosystem public goods you put out a pool of funds and then you allow grants or projects in your ecosystem to access those funds by raising money from their constituents and receiv money from the central matching pool but there's one weird trick with quadratic funding that makes it into a democratic power tool and that's that the matching is based off of the amount of contributors to each project as opposed to the amount that they've given so if you raise $100 from a 100 contributors and I raise $100 from one contributor in a quadratic funding campaign the one with the broader base of support is going to get 99% of the matching pool and this makes quadratic funding into a power tool for funding what matters for everyday people in these communities because the poor in the many get to make Capital allocation decisions instead of the rich in the few quadratic funding has delivered 65 Million worth of funding in the ethereum ecosystem over the last six years on gitcoin but I wanted to prove that we could bring it out of the crypto bubble and to Main Street and so in 2020 when Co was ravaging the world and in my hometown of Boulder Colorado 99% uh decrease in foot traffic for the down town uh was happening businesses were struggling to stay afloat and so I got together with my colleagues Zack Herring and Katie Johnson and we put together a $225,000 matching pool of quadratic funding in downtown Boulder Colorado and we're able to run a quadratic funding campaign for a yoga studio a bookstore uh coffee shop and a couple of other projects downtown so this is what it looked like downtown stimulus.com and basically the way that we positioned this was that you could support local businesses by making a contribution to these businesses using a credit card payout so basically we took quadratic funding we took gitcoin grants we stripped out all the crypto and we just allowed people people to contribute with quadratic funding or sorry with uh with with US Dollars and have their contributions matched by quadratic funding so we had a $25,000 matching pool thank you to vitalic boin and to local philanthropist bradf Feld and we're able to raise $116,000 from 320 320 contributors of an average donation of about $40 and all in all were able to raise about 41 thousand doll for downtown Boulder public goods I think this is really exciting that A Primitive that has been pioneered and distributed in the crypto ecosystem was able to go mainstream with a campaign like downtown stimulus and I'm really excited about this meme of cosmol localism which is basically an approach to production and governance that provides uh a combination of global coordination with knowledge sharing in local manufacturing and resource use emphasizing open- Source software and a relationship between the global and the local where the Global Services the local okay so in what ways can we in the ethereum ecosystem in the open source ecosystem create a Global Commons create knowledge and production that is in service to the local and this is opposed to the web 2 surveillance economy in which you have Facebook Communities going into your local communities and surveiling everyone and tearing apart the social fabric because it's more profitable for Facebook shareholders that way how can the ethereum commons be in service of the local Commons is the design space of cosmol localism and ethereum localism and I'm happy to say that downtown stimulus to me is a proof point that this is possible we can take the programmable money where we program our values into our money in the ethereum space from the ethereum space and start applying it to downtowns uh across the world and I'm really excited to see what kind of experiments in public goods funding Community currency supporting the Arts and supporting public goods that we can do uh when we do that so I'm Kevin aaki founder of gitcoin that's been downtown stimulus thanks so much for your time thank you Kevin hello hello amazing we have like uh roughly 5 minutes for questions um by by the way I'm also a big fan of cosmal localism yeah thanks anyone in the audience uh the gentleman is the purple head should I oh wow you're good good catch thanks um yeah I love your work and all that um I was going to ask with um things like Community currencies and um things like that where you might put conditions on your money I I sometimes think that that's obviously a restricted form of trade that um whereas like regular Fe currencies are sort of unrestricted so with that lens how would you say that the community currencies can sort of out compete Freer money if that's a right premise fig yeah so the question is how can Community currencies out compete National currencies yeah like how how would it have more utility if it's somewhat constrained in some ways yeah um I think the community currency are cool as an outsider but I'm not a designer of any so I'm not qualified to answer that question uh I think Scott Morris has done a lot of work on community currencies and I would ask him yeah I guess I was riffing off the um like adding our values to our money and if you put sort of constraints on it in that sense to fuel our values I can see definitely the bigger picture that that's that's awesome and I want to see more of that but then I also sort of play Devil's Advocate as more so another friend does this to me where he sort of says well I could just do that with the US dollar or do that with this spere currency so I'm trying to sort of find the arguments like other arguments that say this um money with value restrictions is kind of more better in a more immediate form than I can currently argue so I'm trying to find on that side yeah um uh I think that uh you know one of the things that I see a parallel between what we're doing in the crypto ecosystem and what community currencies have done for hundreds of years is that what we're doing in the crypto ecosystem is mically local and Community currencies are geographically local okay so like uh to me mimetically local means that like gitcoin a public goods funding uh coin filecoin is a file storage coin ethereum is a computational coin in in in a local mimic area and so you know in what ways in what what we learn in community currencies can be applied to Global currencies like Dow currencies and vice versa I think that there might be sort of a cosmol local convergence there yeah but my talk was about quadratic funding more than Community currencies uh I I think that they're both cool though thank you do we have time for one more question yes we do gentleman over there thank you hi Kevin hey um what do you think or what in your mind will be the hardest part of building some uh version of a downtown U uh stimulus in in in another local community finding the the initial donors or the tech probably Tech is just foring something or uh making people understand how to use the system or anything like in your experience what what you think is is the focus should the focus be on on if if you want to build something in in my own local community Pro yeah great question so uh we built a code base that you can use to do Fiat quadratic funding round it's called Simple grants. XYZ go to simple grants. XYZ Fork it deploy it in your own local community um I should put that in the talk actually now I think about it um but yeah the hardest part honestly was raising the initial 25k uh quadratic funding campaigns in web 3 there's a lot of treasuries that are just hundreds of millions of dollars and we draw on those to run quadratic funding rounds in qf but the uh the the raising of funds to do quadratic funding locally is sort of hampered by uh are you do you have access to wealthy individuals who are willing to do it and can you crack the nut of the local government actually funding it we actually went around the local government we didn't even talk to the local government government because their funding Cycles are just quarters and quarters long so to answer your question I think that raising the initial amount of funding is the hardest thing that you'll do if you're if you're going to run these campaigns and hopefully we can make the tech a little bit easier with simple Grant St XYZ thank you for the question thank you and that's it for the at the time okay