Open source contributor funding could become one of the most effective long term solutions for maintaining and improving any Web3 ecosystem. Our analysis has helped to highlight multiple advantages and opportunities with this funding approach.
To find out whether this approach is in fact effective or not the next step is to trial some small and inexpensive experiments so we can then analyse the results.
Background
Prior to the suggestion of running a contributor funding experiment we have been analysing treasury systems and creating educational resources for over a year. Some of these resources include:
The most promising opportunity that came out of this period of analysis is how promising an open source contributor funding process could be as a long term solution for Web3 ecosystems.
Contributor funding has many advantages:
- For contributors, this funding process represents a simpler and quicker approach for them to join an ecosystem and be considered as a candidate to receive funding. Contributors would have more flexibility to generate impact in the ecosystem in a multitude of ways based on their own preferences and skill sets. Contributors would not be tied to a single idea which would mean they can become increasingly more autonomous over time in deciding what they work on. All that matters for a contributor is that they generate as much impact as possible for the ecosystem. Contributors would benefit from less budgeting complexity by not needing to create proposals that use complex and estimated costings. Contributors would also have increased income stability due to being paid for a fixed term length. Over the long term this approach would give contributors more ownership and influence over their own career trajectory and how they build up their own reputation.
- For voters, this suggested contributor funding process could offer a far simpler and easier decision making process that is easier to scale for a growing population of community members. Voting could also get easier over time as community members learn about which contributors are the most performant as now they can simply reselect them in future voting decisions.
- For Web3 ecosystems, treasuries could become more effective at generating impact if assets are can be used more efficiently. Funds would always be used to pay for a contributors recent contribution efforts rather than sitting idle in over funded ideas. Contributor funding could provide a reliable long term approach for developing open source initiatives that help with improving an ecosystems network, infrastructure, protocols, software libraries and applications. As the contributor funding process matures there is even an opportunity that it could create a safe and reliable way for founding entities to push the stewardship of the ecosystem over to the community.
If you had any thoughts or feedback about our existing treasury and funding analysis please share it below or reach out to us directly.
Open source contributor funding experiment
The analysis so far has highlighted the opportunity of experimenting with open source contributor funding. Our next step is to explore how we can most effectively learn and experiment with this funding process as cost efficiently as possible.
We recently finished creating an open source contributor funding experiment, documenting how this experiment could be executed. The experiment uses existing tools and services that would be cheap and simple to operate. An example experiment resource has also been created to showcase what a contributor funding process could look like.
This experiment represents a great opportunity to learn about the implications of operating a contributor funding process and how it performs in practice. Insightful information would be captured about the outcomes it produces, how voters, contributors and the wider community participate in this funding process and whether these participants end up preferring this approach over other funding approaches.
Our suggested experiment would also trial a number of suggestions that came out of our funding analysis. Some of these suggested approaches include:
- Individual monthly contribution logs
- Expressive approval voting
- Independent contribution systems
- Delegated idea selection
- Measuring contributor impact
- Capturing preferences & opinions from community
Checking if Polkadot is a good fit for this experiment
Polkadot has already been experimenting with contributor funding in the form of the technical fellowship. This suggested experiment could be more focussed on the tools and libraries that are being built on top of the network infrastructure.
We can find out whether this funding experiment is a good fit or not for Polkadot without using any funding.
- The first step of this experiment is to create a priority suggestions board. This board will enable the community to share their suggestions about the open source initiatives that they believe are the most important for contributors to focus on. Community members would be able to express exactly what they think and upvote the suggestions they agree with. The suggestion board would be for everyone to use, including the founding entities, existing project teams and any other community member in the ecosystem.
This priority suggestion board should help with providing insightful information about whether there is enough impactful areas of work to focus on that would justify a funded experiment.
- Assuming there is a sufficient amount of impactful work to focus on, the next step will be to invite community members to submit contributor proposals with their personal and professional information. The founding entities are still not committing to the experiment at this stage and instead are finding out what developers are interested and available for this potential funding experiment.
With these two steps completed, the most relevant information should now be available to make an informed decision about whether it makes sense or not to continue with this experiment. It should be clear what focus areas the contributors could work on to generate impact for the ecosystem and also which developers are currently interested and available for the experiment.
If it was decided that the experiment will continue and be executed it would be inexpensive to operate. Most of the tools and services are either free or low cost to use. The funding operator contribution costs would also total less than $10,000 to fund the entire experiment.
The main decision that the founding entities need to make is how many contributors should be funded for the experiment and for what period of time. These decisions should at least now be easier to make due to the available priority suggestions and contributor proposal data.
Open discussion & feedback
This is an open proposal that is looking for any thoughts and feedback from the community.
Please share any feedback and thoughts you have about this suggested funding experiment below.
If there was interest I could also organise a video call for people to chat about this suggestion in more detail.
