🌱 k3nn.log — seeds of labor
I still have not been able to shake this feeling. We've been incredibly blessed to have participated in the latest Gitcoin round. And somehow, becoming a top DeSci project along the way, only second to New Atlantis [who truly deserves the #1 spot!]. Thank you to everyone who contributed to talentDAO and Project LION, especially the funding partners who sponsored DeSci. It means the world to us that so many of you share our vision for the future.
talentDAO raised a tremendous $50,000 – a sum that will not only impact the development of the first blockchain native journal for the social sciences, but also the work of talentDAO researchers across the globe. In addition, we'll be piloting a new apprenticeship program that aims to empower a league of techno-organizational scientists ready to build the future of decentralized work.
Project LION independently raised about $1500 and got a ton of great exposure. For me, this was the validation needed to really push the project forward. With the added support from labDAO and talentDAO, the funds we raised should help us progress on the development of LION v1.0.
The most incredible part about this experience for me was that the total investment into these two projects was less than a 10th the total raised. In fact, most people only donated a few DAI. It was the magic of quadratic funding that dramatically scaled up our fundraising capacity.
Quadratic funding works by pooling a bunch of money together from a set of funding partners and applying an algorithm that maximizes a match amount for each individual donation. The more donars a project has, the greater the matching function. A Gitcoin round also has tags – like the DeSci tag – that may have their own unique matching function and money pools.
The objective of quadratic funding is to democratize the fundraising process by building a proxy for social interest. The system Gitcoin uses is itself open source and surrounded by a community of devs optimizing the smart contract after assessing data from each round. A decentralized open source developer community oversees and distributes a multi-million dollar grant program and they seem to be doing a fantastic job.
Quadratic funding is a collective superpower and a wicked solution. I'd love to see it become a regular funding vehicle for scientific and technological innovation.
Collective intelligence may not always be the best way to make decisions. I don't believe the wisdom of the crowd is somehow better than the experts. But the current grant funding system isn't exactly producing spectacular results and quadratic funding seems to be a promising new approach.
Entry 28.8
minor update
My next several posts will be dedicated to Project LION. In a few days, I'll reveal our master plan.
Updates on development, write-ups on experiments, and reflections about AI, social systems, language and communication are all likely to come in the posts that follow.
I look forward to documenting our progress.
k3nn