One of many possible positive-sum futures In addition to the finalists mentioned in our summary post, the Gitcoin team wanted to take a moment to highlight a few projects that didn’t quite make it to the top 7 that we believe were strong contenders, whether in terms of their vision or in terms of the deep and thoughtful quality of their writing. Many of these members have gone on to join the Public Library, a thriving community of public goods advocates. Ultimately, we hope these honorable…
In addition to the finalists mentioned in our summary post, the Gitcoin team wanted to take a moment to highlight a few projects that didn’t quite make it to the top 7 that we believe were strong contenders, whether in terms of their vision or in terms of the deep and thoughtful quality of their writing.
Many of these members have gone on to join the Public Library, a thriving community of public goods advocates. Ultimately, we hope these honorable mentions can inspire more people to take individual action to build for the public good.
Without further adieu, here is the list of honorable mentions!
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Atlas Futura — A Guild for Cosmotechnicists
Wendi Yan, Lila Shroff, Jasmine Wang
Atlas Futura is a proposed guild of cosmotechnicists intent on expanding the collective imaginary of our futures through public, interactive cryptomedia. Bringing together artists, philosophers, technologists and scientists, members will collectively speculate what futures could be, and release “world drops” to share the visions as artwork. Philosophically, the guild is rooted in the belief that creating a pluralistic store of possible futures is a necessary act as we build the new infrastructure of web3. In this proposal, we provide an execution pipeline and a series of potential “world drops” for Atlas Futura.
REBOOT: Progress for whom?
Jasmine Sun
Reboot (joinreboot.org) is a nonprofit publication and community reclaiming techno-optimism for a better collective future. Building on the legacy of movements like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Network, Reboot brings together writers, engineers, historians, futurists, activists, and scientists into the shared project of imagining, advocating for, and creating better human-technological futures. Ultimately, Reboot aims to seed a new generation of tech leaders who think critically, learn collaboratively, and embrace their agency to build a more thoughtful, equitable, and abundant world than the one we’ve been handed.
The Algorithmic Resistance Cookbook
Andreas Tsamados
The Algorithmic Resistance Cookbook aims to be a collection of resources on algorithmic and data-related resistance and appropriation. It is an attempt at locating individual agency within technological systems of power. The cookbook is primarily intended for activists and people who look for ways to practice resistance to intrusive and repressive aspects of present-day algorithmic culture, whether individually or collectively, whether pro-actively/productively or re-actively/disruptively. With it you can contribute or learn useful ‘recipes’ for action –from protecting your and others’ privacy on- and offline, to using open source algorithms for political petitioning, to “poisoning ” invasive algorithmic surveillance systems.
The Limits of Public Goods
Henry Zhu
Because crypto can be seen as a digital public good, it may be best to view it as a tool similar to a phone, a school, and even our language. Like how any natural or programming language create opportunities for communication and creation, they also limit what we can imagine. With the help of the historian Ivan Illich, we ask different questions: How do tools change our perception of ourselves and the root metaphors of our age? How can we think through how to balance what tools can do for us vs. what we can do for ourselves? How can we discover the limits of our tools or even ourselves?
A Digital Yggdrasil: Education as a Public Good
Hum Qing Ze
Web3 moves fast, so our educational efforts need to move faster. Doing so sustains the ecosystem and enables newcomers to contribute meaningfully. Web3 can be the chance for us to finally transform education from an under-consumed and underprovided merit good into a new digital public good. This can be accomplished through: (a) making Web3 resources understandable, searchable, and accessible, (b) talent-matching, and (c) establishing a meta DAO that funds Web3 educational resources.
Creator Cabins as a Public Good
Jonathan Hillis
One of the most important and overlooked kinds of public goods is liminal time and space. Marginal environments have historically been how the future gets seeded—from the spare time outside of Einstein’s day job to the spare space in the garages of the Bay Area that birthed Apple and Google. At CABIN, we believe in creating an environment for exploration, collaboration, and creation within these types of spaces. Our residency program aims to do this within the context of a crowdfunded DAO, by opening up time and space as a public good to promising independent online creators. We also see a future where the infrastructure of entire decentralized cities are funded as public goods, and we are exploring governance and community paths to make that possible.
North Star for a New Web
Cody Brown
A Northstar for a New Web is a project to get a variety of Web 3 builders on the record with an honest assessment of what they think went wrong with the last chapter of the web, and what they are excited about for this new era. This is a collective writing prompt and anonymity is allowed. We’re particularly interested in pulling in people with battle scars from the previous web who have been unable to speak publicly because of NDA. This project is planned to launch towards the end of the year and be released at the start of 2022.
Towards an Online Commons
David Phelps
So often our notion of “public goods” relies on a bounded notion of the “public” as a nation or even internet exclusive to humans. But the greater public goods that support us—and that we have a responsibility to support as well—are simply those of ecological ecosystems, which frequently offer models for sustainable economies. An EcoDAO built as a gift economy of artists supporting each other’s work could effectively use web3 opportunities—where purchases are investments rather than expenses—to raise money to support the same ecological systems that inspire it.
IRL Art
Annie Phillips
IRLart is a collective made up of artists, developers, forward thinkers and creators all over the world, together we work to build an ecosystem in which art and creative expression is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. We build strategic partnerships with aligned technologies, projects, organizations and municipalities to support our artists with the tools, technologies, funding and opportunities to share their creative gifts with the diverse audiences worldwide.
Society If All Games Were Open Source
Paul Gadi
Through the years, the game industry has shifted away from the open web and centralized more and more around Web 2.0 platforms: app stores and ad networks. In today’s attention economy, these platforms became the arbiters of success. They extract value from each step of the game development process, and their monetization pathways force developers to create games specifically designed to keep players playing forever.
In this article we explore how we can use public goods concepts to decentralize away from the platforms, starting with developing open source games. We also touch on related mechanisms such as building Game Legos and community ownership. We engage game developers to explore new ways of sustainably creating video games, and to break the incentive and game loops that we’re all used to running.
Nebula.garden
Ola Kohut
Nebula is a publication showcasing people & projects at the “edge of reality”. We’re exploring the intricacies of collective, cooperative & anarchist organizing, alongside strategies for decentralization. We understand the real “public good” as reorganization of society along just and ecological lines. We map contemporary “utopias” – not as mere wishful thinking, but as grounded actions being undertaken around the world. This is a framework that Nebula explores when putting the stories of a Black farming & healing cooperative, a Palestinian coding community, a basic income on the blockchain, or a network of regenerative culture leaders in the same space. We want to understand how crypto systems feed back into social change beyond the technocratic version of decentralization. We want to widen perspectives and build upon each other’s learnings, so that no one feels like they are starting from scratch.
A cooperative platform’s transition to web 3.0
Austin Robey
Community tokens can become a powerful tool, allowing digital cooperatives to be bootstrapped by their members, outside of venture capital. Cooperatives are traditionally difficult to start, in large part because of funding challenges. Although community tokens are beginning to emerge as a new model for powering democratic networks, there are few examples of this path as an explicit alternative to venture capital ownership. If demonstrated successfully, layering community tokens onto an existing digital cooperative could provide a roadmap for new ways to start collectively-owned businesses, and help imagine a true ownership economy.
A DAO for Public Goods
Lani Trock
The Public Goods DAO is a marketplace of commissioned, collected and curated nfts that utilize splits to support artists, benefit public goods and sustain the DAO. The DAO also maintains a public directory of vetted social impact orgs & artists who wish to fund them, and utilizes both directory & marketplace to onboard new contributors into web3. The DAO sets them up with ENS addresses, displayed in the directory so that anyone can easily allocate a % to them in their splits. Lastly the DAO cultivates a repository of modular, flexible, open-source frameworks for public goods projects built on the blockchain, for others to adapt and experiment with locally, in their own communities. We build bridges from web2->3 by direct invitations to participate, and confer legitimacy by facilitating collaborations between newcomers and established web3 communities. Through the illumination of successful use cases; we pave the pathway forward, establishing innovative strategies for art to be an ongoing funding mechanism and sustaining cultivator of good in the world.