Ecosystem conventions around the funding of R&D by on-chain treasuries

[rich]

@burdges

imho your two threads feel unrelated. I’ll therefore presume “financial research” is off-topic for this thread (and I replied separately in the Messari thread).

Clarified in the original post, but ostensibly yes. The key is:

@rich

using native substrate tools, resources and talent to build both internally relevant and externally valuable R&D functions - innovation labs, that start small, but ultimately are able to draw in multidisciplinary talent, on foundations that enable more fluid exploration due to the more liquid forms of funding, democracy and organisation we have.

@burdges

We certainly need development funding, which the fellowship hopefully achieves. We’ve maybe tweaked the fellowship for some development focused research too.

The Fellowship is one example org and you outline some interesting areas for research, the question becomes what else can follow / or operate in parallel…

@rich

If we can agree that Substrate/Polkadot represents a melting pot of many different areas (distributed systems/tech/economics/social science/arts to name a few) and that in the case of mainnet deployments we are really discovering and generating new knowledge based on the lived experience of building these social structures, we may more easily figure ways to structure, organise, fund, document and value R&D groups, who will better cross-fertilise ideas and indeed drive forward the development of the ecosystem.

Which leads us to:

@rich

using native substrate tools, resources and talent to build both internally relevant and externally valuable R&D functions - innovation labs, that start small, but ultimately are able to draw in multidisciplinary talent, on foundations that enable more fluid exploration due to the more liquid forms of funding, democracy and organisation we have.

@rich

To achieve this we need to double down on multidisciplinary applied R&D orgs (collectives) that are upstream of the treasuries and therefore voters, that can enable way more experimentation - for example an on-chain media innovation lab - imagine if MIT media lab was born and raised onchain.

And:

@rich

These creative projects are the signal for onboarding more experimental creators, academics and technologists for whom price speculation is not the driving motivation. This powers a flywheel for delivering far more artistic projects that will likely interpret the tools in ways that more financially focused talent wouldn’t, since that starting point necessarily filters a world view through a purely economic lens.

To deliver us ‘education’ but in a more playful way:

This lateral approach is what effective polkadot education will look like - it’s creative contribution, cooperation and play, that unlocks new knowledge, creating foundations for creative output that will be far more interesting, inspiring and ultimately original, than the standard marketing approaches we currently see, and ultimately bootstraps use of the underlying tech in the process.