Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling: How Do We Fund Community And Ecosystem Growth | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] thank you everyone for coming I know it's the end of the day I know it's the end of a big week but we're all really excited we got a great panel here for you and I'm super excited to kick it off um so my name is Anna I currently lead Community programs on the ecosystem team at the cello foundation and I was previously at maker Foundation and I'm going to first give you a little bit of a background for how I ended up in this space and how I kind of started thinking about this this panel and this idea and why I became really fascinated with the topic of ecosystem growth and funding ecosystem specifically um so I want to give you an example like working for nobody works for ethereum and in the same way nobody works for cello but a lot of us work on ecosystem and it doesn't mean that there aren't people working for it but there's people working for different entities that are funding ecosystem growth and ecosystem development and watching the ecosystem maker first being bootstrapped by maker foundation and then decentralizing to be entirely managed by the Dell I started thinking about how do we think about different levers that we have to leverage ecosystem growth out of foundation the primary lever that we have is Grants um but in and and usually they are coordinated by a pretty centralized group of people but at Adele it can be managed by a governance Community uh you can tap into unchain funding and then you can also have various new methods of ecosystem growth like uh Delta doubt swaps and other various tooling so I want to give first everyone a chance to give an introduction uh starting with Juan and maybe you can tell a little bit of a background for how you've seen this happen at maker yeah thank you Anna I'm Juan from the sustainable ecosystem scaling core unit at megadel a joint maker um right before the foundation started to to dissolve so uh yeah it was very very chaotic and extremely interesting and since then I've been pretty much working on scaling the ecosystem we used to do a lot of different things in the beginning we were very a team that was very um that different uh it's a very the skills were very were very mixed and that was extremely interesting and then through the last year and a half or so we've been like specializing and now we are we're on the building the like operational tools for the centralized Workforce um then legal resilience and and finally what we call governance design because we haven't found a better name yet but um yeah that's pretty much uh what I've been doing for the last year so very much looking forward to to speaking here with these great people thank you and kicking out to Abby hi my name is Abby um my role now is the head of community and governance at radical so for those who don't know radical we basically build decentralized collaboration tools and infrastructure for people building decentralized Technologies um and so uh but we really consider ourselves even more so than a crypto project we consider ourselves more so a free and open source project um and so my view on ecosystem scaling definitely comes from uh the concept of like ecosystem in open source projects and communities um and you realize that in like web3 everything's open source and so inherently you know we're actually Building open source ecosystems and communities and so it's been over the last couple of years there stewarding governance and working on community I think that it's all been about like combining our crypto community and ecosystem learnings and what it means to scale a crypto ecosystem with what does it mean to scale like an open source project in an open source ecosystem so um and I think the difference there is how do we progressively decentralize to support the emergence and autonomy of an open source ecosystem and I think my focus has been on like optimistically designing new Futures in which decentralized Technologies can better support the coordination and growth of Open Source ecosystems and the resilience of Open Source ecosystems so um so yeah so right now how we're acting on that and kind of what we're trying to do in practice is one of my main projects right now is helping lead the our transition to the Dao which means a lot of things but basically means progressively decentralizing the project from where we were prior which was basically like a venture-funded startup to a foundation with um you know a token governed Dao to now the next stage which is you know dissolving aspects of the radical foundation and transitioning those responsibilities to an autonomous decentralized entity that lives within the Dow is funded via the Dao and acts as a participant within the Dow among other orgs that will slowly emerge over time so um yeah in that process we're thinking a lot about what it means to not only scale an ecosystem but support an ecosystem that's scaling and what foundations do you need to put in place to um you know kind of actually support growth and resilience throughout a progressive decentralization or transition um and so we're excited to chat about that today yeah and Progressive decentralization is the reason that I'm so excited to be sharing the stage with y'all because I feel like we are we've been at different stages of this and we've seen this through the ecosystem perspective but ELP I really want to hear your background and how do you think about ecosystem yeah thank you hey guys it's Al I started my journey like as an entrepreneur let's say like a couple of years back with a web to start up working on like Agriculture and like food Technologies then I started to participate in circular economies researchers United Nation and European Union under some organizations there and worked a lot on ground and try to understand actually what we could do to improve the lives of people in developing countries more then I joined purse with Git coin then I started with prime now then now I'm doing something called inverter Network which is we're trying to learn the traditional know-how from International organizations like United Nations and European Union which they have something called Data portal where they receive like all the applications like Grant applications and they pay milestone-based funding to these organizations and like individuals try to empower them trying to teach them with mentors and program managers such as like ourselves in the end of the day and now we're trying to understand basically how we can design an ecosystem where the whole empowerment of the individuals can affect the coordination throughout can generate this crypto Network effects that can improve our basically the games that we play you know with economical senses I'm excited to share this stage with all of you to be honest thank you thank you thank you and from my background I actually also started within the maker ecosystem and the reason I'm so interested in funding mechanisms is because I myself originally started in web 3 as a beneficiary of a grant from what we then call Community Development at the maker foundation and that was really a program to incubate the next generation of people that will eventually take over a lot of the functions and be able to manage maker protocol through the dell and so through through that experience and I I learned I learned so much because that was such a pivotal time in our um well for maker but also for the entire ecosystem because maker I think was one of the first and really big projects to do that kind of transition and then going to sell a foundation I so I saw the same thing happening but a lot earlier on and I kind of had this I had the front row seat to seeing how to make this the ecosystem scaling sustainable you really have to encourage and you have to design for intentionally for people to be able to have this independent thinking to be able to decide on what things are meaningful for the ecosystem an independent process which has to do with like how do you apply for Grants how do you access funding in a dial this has to do with a lot of core units which is a framework that we'll jump into next and then also independent sources of funding because ultimately having funding at your disposal is what allows you to have agency and if you have agency then you can really execute on the things that are really meaningful for your ecosystem but to jump into what ecosystem development really means I want to ask this to each one of you because what I learned going from protocol like maker to a project like cello which is a layer one is that a layer one your ecosystem is really dependent on your application layer and on your projects and companies that are developing in your ecosystem and also of course like your community and your users and your Advocates and lots of other stakeholders but primarily it's about developing an application layer but what is ecosystem development mean at a project like maker yeah I I like what Abby said but I don't think that that governance should be an afterthought ever you really need to work on the supporting mechanisms and structures and all these Frameworks that will allow you to scale properly otherwise you end up with this type of uh yeah people screaming at each other um I don't know so pretty much it's like you have this bricked version of governance that doesn't allow you to to keep going and and looking forward and and you end up with a mess I can I can speak a bit more about maker if you guys let's talk about the challenges and why why it feels like sometimes it will get to why it feels like running into a brick wall coordinating governance yeah so to just give you the the very quick overview um the way we organized it in the beginning was very optimistic if you if you'd like and that's why right now I'm a bit reticent about any any type of optimistic kind of Grant or or funding mechanism and what it is that anyone can come and permission permissionlessly start a core unit and get funding and it is very very hard for if there are no structure there to actually report on progress on Milestones on on what's happening what's there to be achieved you end up with many delegates that have never run a company trying to judge a topic that they might not understand and there's no auditor or auditing function within this so you end up with MS and that's a bit what we're trying to work on nowadays through maker governance and governance design nice um nice um so yeah I think that in the case of radical and maybe more generally like open source ecosystems I think that there's like different layers of ecosystem development right so I think that there's like ecosystem scale which is related to increasing the number of participants whether that be like users contributors maintainers whatever you'd like um and that's kind of also Community right which is like building um obviously for an open source project that's your maintainers and your contributors and being able to grow your contributors is um a really important part of ecosystem development and then there's resilience which I think um and I would also say what interplays with that is like diversity so like resilience and diversity so what you're saying is like having a really strong diverse application layer Network ecosystem is really important for like a layer one it actually goes the same I think for like open source infrastructure in which you want to be able to have um a more diverse client ecosystem or at least these like technical ecosystem to ensure the projects like longer term resilience and so I think that that's like a really important part um and is why like um things like grants and rfps and bounties are really great because basically you're growing the number of people who are working on the project and you're also increasing the diversity of the project so um so that's one and then I think that there's this other con like dimension of development which is like um I I guess it's kind of like developing the ecosystem you know what I mean which is like not just having a bunch of people but actually um having kind of more of an idea of how you're growing people in an ecosystem so like what you were saying like how um you know grants Were Meant to empower new people to take over leadership roles I think that this is like an incredibly important point of ecosystem which is like ecosystem development which is not just like bringing people in and then just like having them there it's like bringing them in and then developing them and like helping them support and empowering them and growing them into leadership positions and and just becoming like long-term participants and I actually think that this is like low-key the most important and hardest one to do which is like how do you get people uh to stick around how do you create longer term incentives um and how do you embed like longer term commitment because often this is what's actually necessary to um kind of like realize all of these ecosystem Visions um and so I think that all of those are yeah pretty hard to do they all interplay with each other but I think um there's a lot of ways to kind of of like stimulate each type of development so yeah it almost seems that we we had all the tools and smart contracts and to make it very programmatic and we just copied what we've seen from from companies or startups and we said okay we'll run with this yeah so I think there's a huge Miss opportunity there that that we're not exploring I'm like kind of I'm like kind of pessimistic on just programming incentives because I don't think that it often in or encourages the correct Behavior but it is true is that we do have kind of we have different tools and we should be experimenting with like how those tools look like in the long term I mean we kind of are with like tokens right like that's basically like a long-term incentive mechanism that we're trying to experiment and build governance around um but yeah we're definitely like applying the Corp reform like way too much and I think it's just us trying to like process a new design space and like also trying to make things work at the same time you know well I think this has to do with um like we all like to talk about onboarding but what are we actually onboarding into and I working at maker I really saw this very clearly I think there's the onboarding into the technical protocol and then there's onboarding into social protocol and the social protocol is what's really difficult because that's like that's at the core of how do we coordinate with each other like we can have all of the tech stack in the world but how do we actually Implement those things how do we coordinate how do we agree how do we govern well together like the social protocol is the one that's much more I think difficult to build built um and so I think you have a really interesting perspective that's external to like an ecosystem it has more to do with um maybe like developing Regional ecosystems so I I'd love to hear more about how you think about ecosystem thank you just to add really quick like the other day A friend of mine told me flow of capital is the flow of trust so when it comes to ecosystem design as well like to understand the contributor taxonomy and like uh kind of building the development projects in the regions where it's required we really need to understand like the kind of requirements of the system we want to design on the ecosystem side as well and like once we understand the system that we want to design them we can understand the goals that we want to achieve and in the meantime if you have data sets to incentivize we can understand and like we can basically build on parameters on projects that we actually want to kind of interject into that region so for example if you would have a specific development projects in some regions and you could actually have a database to basically see those milestones and deliver that they need to do and also like we can incentivize understanding sanitization methods that have been used by different protocols and different entities whether they are decentralized organizations or traditional organizations I think we can also like kind of have a different perspective to the ecosystem design where the focus would be public goods plus empowerment of the local communities and I think like also maker and like cello are very focused on the regional based ecosystem design which I really enjoy so I think like last year we were talking with you like you were kind of mentioning some a custom design perspective offers in the local communities and economies would be interesting to go into that level as well if you remember the whole Grant programs in like in African regions um because we could actually establish like a kind of block spaces for people to develop themselves and Empower themselves yeah yeah I love that well actually this ties in um into how like the next question that I wanted to go into which is like where are we coming from like what is the past case scenario and like how did we used to think about ecosystem growth versus how are we thinking about it now and what is to look forward to in the future and when I got to Sello a year almost a year and a half ago the cell Foundation was the only entity that was thinking about ecosystem development and so Foundation kind of like set a lot of the goals and like regions and priorities for where we want to develop but now we have created a whole system of governance where people are able to tap into on-chain funding from the protocol and establish their own independent entities that are able to set their own priorities and their own goals so right now in the Forum there's actually several proposals for a latam regional Dell and for Africa Regional Dell that will access funding from the protocol and have this like have the benefit of the independent thinking which like they are actually based there like they're in touch with the local community they're able to make best decisions but then also we'll be able to set their own process for how they want to manage grants how they want to like plan that entire ecosystem how they want to manage deliverables and also have the funding and they're multi-sig to be able to act on those things so if there's like a hackathon they want to sponsor regionally then they can and I think that is huge power and like a tremendous responsibility um but this is yeah this has to do with where we came from and where we're going but um yeah the next question was going to be for kind of talking about what was the past case scenario and where how is it developing now at each of the other projects you want me to start sure I can talk okay I'll talk maybe about General previous state as I've seen and kind of what nuances of like our current state that I think are different so I think in like previous state at least not for like open source ecosystems specifically because those are basically you know like decentralized ecosystems in at their core I think that there was obviously like a much more like centralized approach to ecosystem development in general in which there is like a directed Force that's like kind of um yeah just like creating the community and like running the community I think of like um I don't know if like notion is a really good example of this but like previous projects that have like have been built on like Creator communities in which there's kind of this like top-down directed Force um that's driving an ecosystem forth right and it's very branded it's like very um directed it's very structured often has its own hierarchies because um ecosystem is being looked at as like a means of like growth right and um so yeah I think that's like the previous state and so I think that like now what's different is that we have a lot more headless ecosystems right like headless Brands headless ecosystems in which people are um identifying with different ecosystems and communities without being explicitly tied to itself like we're all part of the ethereum community like I think about how I got into ethereum and it was through hackathon and I just started like hacking right I know it's I didn't know that I love it no that's like a very OG hacker with like Griff green at like common sac and everything um before I found radical and I think that this aspect of community is something that again very much so um parallels like open source ecosystems in which like for example like Russ is this like insane ecosystem right and but it's very headless in that there's like obviously because it's a language right it's like a bunch of people building this language and Building Things on top of it um and other open source ecosystems exhibit this trait as well and so I feel like um now we're seeing companies try to frame themselves as open source ecosystems because they're building open source software again they're also building uh companies and projects right and I think now we're seeing this like mesh of Two Worlds in which this previous state of kind of like Central top-down community ecosystem growth and scaling and this like more decentralized emerging um headless ecosystem approach in crypto right now and I think that that's kind of like why it's I think hard and people try to apply the corporate form because at the end of the day we're not building on entirely Vault volunteer volunteeristic voluntary altruistic volunteer based Network yeah I think intrinsic organization you know what I'm trying to say um we're you know we're building projects that have um actually like a lot of like long-term incentives and value networks attached to them yet we're building open source ecosystems at the same time and I think that that's why it's so tough for us to try to like process like where to go and I think governance is actually the answer because that's the tooling that we can use to kind of figure it out but um yeah so I think we're just like seeing this Clash of like this top-down versus headless approach um and I think it's really exciting to start embracing new forms of the Headless ecosystem growth approach as we start looking forward Juan maybe you can tell us why governance is the answer yeah what we've noticed is that um it's a I mean we kind of predicted that this was going to happen and make her scale to a size uh that it's hard to tell like the kind of contributors is some somewhere between 120 to 170 um and this is because again it's it's decentralized so it's hard to tell but what we failed to build uh when we when we started this this Frameworks to to allow for M care holders to Direct Value so we went from a foundation very clear top-down um and before we can argue about the benefits of its grants and how that worked for better and worse and then we went to this uh to this mechanism where we have a lot of core units and there's really no incentive to integrate or to collaborate so every core unit is we have a very flat hierarchy and there's no there's no way for mkr holders to push core units to work together or to integrate or to um yeah to make things happen and to create value for the protocol so I think that's something we will see in the in the next couple of months is we're going to see a trend that shifts from onboarding people which is bring as many people as you can to how do we build this coordination mechanisms to make sure that we can actually coordinate so right now there's no tool that I'm aware of and if you're building something please reach out to actually build consensus and make sure that we can create a decentralized strategy that involves the owner of the projects that are the ones holding the token so um yeah I might be diverging a bit too much but no no I think this is great and actually I think that's this is a great example of like a past State and moving into a current state but can you give us an example of like what what what is a core unit and how did you um because you really helped write the mipset that established core unit so can you tell us a little bit more about like what what core units were what core units were meant to be and what the promise of core units was versus like where it is now a year almost a year and a half later yeah so we we got inspired I think from from software a bit so we went to the highest abstraction and we say well we said what what do you need and every single project organization anything it's it's work which is what are we trying to get done it's the workforce which is who's contributing and it's the the incentives of the capital so basically that's that was it uh you if you feel a mips 39 um there you declare what your mission is and what you're trying to achieve for for maker the Meep 40 is and then maybe some maker Improvement proposal um before is a budget so I'm requesting this much money I'm going to hire all these people and yeah and then the 41 was the the facilitator which is the kind of like the responsible person accountable to governance regarding this um regarding this process and I think that everything that could have gone wrong went wrong so we learned a lot from it uh we ended up with the facilitator less core units we ended up with Anonymous off-boardings of Koreans that were not working out uh we ended up I don't know upsizing and downsizing budgets so it was extremely messy we learned a lot um um and yeah that's that's with the the where we are today and if you have heard about the endgame plan the end game plan that's why it sounds so uh so crazy but it's because we need to um make the I think we need to make the ex the implicit complexity we need to make it explicit and we need to make sure that everyone understands otherwise you end up in this uh in this Dallas where the the very strong personalities kind of like Get Away with everything and and the you can call them the nice people I guess as a euphemism uh end up like push aside so so that's a bit what we're trying to to work with right now the off-boarding proposal is really interesting and really really key and when I got to sell I realized that we have a way to tap into this pool of money at the protocol level and the on-chain funding but we actually have no off-boarding proposal to claw those funds back whenever something goes wrong if something inevitably at one point does go wrong um because we are all still learning and we are still trying to understand like how to operate how to operationalize this new paradigm like we all can talk about the ideas behind it but then once you start to operationalize it you realize once the core units have been out in the wild for a year you realize all the things that have gone wrong Abby do you have any like parallels to core units uh radical and how do you think about like how interdependent entities can tap into that funding and yeah if you've thought about onboarding and off-boarding proposed those wow so much we took a lot of inspiration so again we're currently like in the midst of this like transition right so we're currently designing the organizational framework that will um absorb the responsibilities that currently uh remain in the foundation Council for directing coordinating and funding all core team development so our core units are technically called core teams right um and so in that process we've kind of like scoped out like a new ecosystem design in which instead of envisioning the radical Dow just funding One Core team again in the essence of Open Source and decentralization we envisioned the Dao which is a community governed treasury funding different orgs which act as these like nested polycentric you know organizations that kind of resemble sub-dials in the sense that they have their own governance processes they have their own memberships um but they still require certain trust level delegated from the Dow right and so in that process um in these orgs then become responsible for being independent thinkers funders and have their own process within the Dow using Anna's framework um about like that they all are then kind of trusted to allocate Capital within their mandate and so then they fund teams and so teams instead of making proposals directly to the tower making it to the org themselves and the org is making the decision on how to onboard or offward teams within their own like local jurisdiction if you will um and so the reason that we did this is because again like radical success will be in how we deploy this treasury in the long term to fund the growth of the radical ecosystem the growth and the resilience of the radical ecosystem right like we're not a D5 protocol you know we're trying to build a self-sustaining community-owned and operated open source project um and so for us that means um you know learning and taking learnings from Dao's about how we can like make it more effective to you know coordinate budgets and goals so we're not just like negotiating like haircuts all the time you know is um I think that that process has led us to this like more emergent model that supports the autonomy of these orgs themselves and the governance processes of themselves so um in terms of like onboarding and off-boarding that means that there needs to be like explicit like I said trust levels between the Dao the Orcs And the teams um and so there's actually like a lot of really going back to what you were saying about like designing like smart contracts and how we can like be trying out new things instead of like corporate forms is that there's like a lot of really cool tools like being built by like gnosis Guild right now um uh and with like the Zodiac mods that allow you know like the like Dao the Dow is like a community governed um entity to delegate trust and revoke trusts in really interesting ways so like one of those is like I forget what mod is called but like the Guard Mod I think um in which a dow can send funding to a multi-sig but then there could be a mod built into the safe um that allows the community to revoke the funds from the multi-sig um overriding the the signatures on the multi-sig when you think about that that's a really powerful thing because we're able to rebalance and redistribute the power of delegating and revoking trust among an organization and create more autonomous flows for that which I think better supports the emergence of an ecosystem because you're not just having these like Gatekeepers deciding who's onboarded and who's not off-boarding and so that's really important when you're trying to develop more headless brands in which people can be onboarding to the ecosystem and doing it in a way that's autonomous meaning the power is distributed yet the community also has the power to kind of keep it in check and so these checks and balances I think are like incredibly incredibly important and that's I think our current challenge that I'm really excited to be diving into now which is like how can we be encoding those rules that embed those checks and balances between the community the orgs themselves which represent you could say The Trusted actors in the ecosystem and then the ecosystem that those orgs are funding um and then the general community of people who are participating and and supporting like the radical projects so it's all about like kind of like looking at all these different participants and figuring out how to best distribute power and Trust to support like the emergence of the ecosystem without just kind of doing this like whole like spray and pray approach to just like know with no accountability or like no um you know mechanisms for recourse so amazing that's super interesting and that's super important trust is super important but then also like I want to talk about process because I think both Dows and like more centralized foundations really struggle with this because like we can give a grand but then how do you ultimately like report on the success of that Grant and how do you track Milestones because same as in maker like a core unit or a facilitator can get money but then it's it's the facilitator's sole responsibility or like the team's responsibility to then like see through how that team is allocating funding and like Juan you can talk about later uh more so like the challenges with that but I know you're developing a lot of actual like tooling with the proposal inverter for how you can um how you can go about like putting together a proposal getting funding for the proposal tracking milestones and then reporting on those Milestones so I'd love to hear your perspective on this thank you process perspective um so I think like we have like this traditional like a know-how that has been working for the last 20 years like that has circulated around two trillion dollars I think globally um United Nations World Bank EU they always fund milestone-based funding they require proof of work as in like upload documentations they assign you mentors and program managers and I think that's kind of what you touched upon as well like it's kind of mycelium like a mushroom Network in a way if you if you would like to say where you need to have hand holding in the culture and you need to make sure this hand holding has a cultural infrastructure that has been built upon right so that's what's really interests me in the end of today with Milestone and deliverables so if you could actually write a proposal and every we could separate the funders to ecosystem funders and verifying funders so I custom funders being trying to incentivize the communities and individuals to build on top of their infrastructure and verifying funders being the subject matter experts who can like look at the projects and understand the again requirements problems and what can be done and if you could coordinate that I think like we can get to a level of distrust layers where a custom Founders can trust the verifying funders by verifying Founders can bear verify the actual Builders of the costume so that's kind of what we're trying to achieve with the motor Network now we are building like this mechanism where you can write a proposal applied to Any Grant application or like dial funding through that or traditional organization funding gaps as well like African grants program in Tanzania and then they will ask you additional questions according to their cultural infrastructure that they built upon may that be kyc or like specific requirements about the contributors and Builders and then it's basically Milestone based funding where you have to upload the work you have to provide the feedback as a funder you have to provide the feedback and as a builder you have to provide the feedback so we can have this feedback loops in the end of today it's just a give it an example from the inverter yeah I like the mycelium networks I think checks and balances should actually be reframed as like symbiotic relationships it's technically the same thing I actually think we have more potential to build symbi symbiosis between like participants in a system than like just checks and balances to like reframe the language and instead of applying like all of our like political corporate form stuff to it you know yeah and I agree that I think that eventually we need all the the tools to make it super easy for anyone and make sure that it's uh that is extremely easy and the guardrails are in place um yeah I'm curious you know if you're in terms of Grants and if you're using any type of specific tools that you have liked or or if you follow a more manual process a personal ad maker is extremely manual uh can we like notion like all of the dials run on Ocean everything runs on notion pretty much an ocean pipeline so how many times can we say notion in this paper we've been telling with the with different tools um and yeah looking forward to find one that will actually work I think that's also an industry that will help us a lot in terms of tooling and grounds but I think we need to reach that point where it's almost permissionless and there's almost no no one to to yeah to to verify it right eventually I don't know use Claris or something but uh I hope we get there yeah yeah and we've experimented with a few um like grants automation tooling I mean well first of all like yes we do actually use an ocean pipeline to track grants and we we have an application that comes in like we have this whole process that we build out where like an application goes in it gets assigned uh like a few reviewers um they like based on their area of expertise the way that we do grants is by vertical so like if there's like an nft vertical or like I personally fund community and ecosystem or community and education grants so like I would review that vertical and then we have like a whole process for moving that Grant down a pipeline we in the future like we really wanted to experiment more with um like open decision making and being able to post um all those applications to like a public forum but then the challenge of the foundation is we can't always disclose um like exact applications or like what people are the amounts that people are requesting for so some of the way that we try to solve this is one tool we're going to Pilot is Quest book or not Quest Book quest book yes Quest book is one of it no is it yes yes okay great isn't an accounting software that's not what I'm trying to say QuickBooks okay okay Quest Book quest book request book um and climate Collective which is actually one of the first or I guess the second uh independent entity that has gotten money from the protocol to specifically fund like climate and refi related projects they're going to experiment with Quest book as a way to do like more decentralized and more open um grants process then the other way is like we just use git congrants as well and like we match we do matching rounds on bitcoin grants like that to me is one of the like best open source like open Community participatory ways to do grants that's external to an ecosystem um and I think we're still learning so yeah if anyone is building uh grounds tooling I want to have to know I want to give a shout out to our grants lead uh boredom who was actually someone who came through the community and now leads our grants program we're only in we just finished the first season starting up the second season now um but their approach to Grants is really cool and I think it's something that I'd like to see more in the space in which I don't think grants should just be this like single singular like one-dimensional type of funding and that grants are an opportunity to again like not only source more people and grow an ecosystem but to provide and develop people within an ecosystem and so um what they're doing with like the grants program is actually trying to reframe it kind of as a little sub-dial build its own governance processes have its own management um that allow uh for people not only for other orgs within the radical Dao such as like the core development org which is the core teams to direct work by submitting like rfps or something but to also experiment and this is what they're going to start doing now uh with how you can even decentralize the decision making of the grants itself right which I think is like another me means of creating more autonomy in these funding sources instead of it being kind of like our it's like not our foundation grants program right it's boredom's grant program and boredom is listening and kind of creating a symbiotic relationship with like the core teams themselves and so there's a lot of Cool Tools like for example they're using um outer space badges which are basically like these like non-transferable nft badges to um create uh you know a like spawn a membership model that exists within the down can be recognized by the parent Dao but have its kind of own structure integrate that with snapshot and now you have like a decentralized governance system that's like very very scoped to the participants in within that certain Realm of the ecosystem and I think that that's going to be a really cool experiment and how can you again support the emergence of these kind of like independent funding streams that have their own mandate yet also um you know create these trusted relationships so that like other orgs can kind of check the power of the grants and the Dow has to kind of approve of like allocating fun funds and so I think that that will be like a really good experiment moving forward and you know seeing what tooling can kind of support that type of organization yeah totally and also um I'll I know that Prime has done a lot of work on like Prime rating and conviction voting as a way to also like separate signal from the noise and understand which grants are like worthwhile funding can you tell us more about how you think about that yeah um so basically the main concept is conviction model so which would be a again a trust layer so if you would to recognize specific Grant programs and like be satisfied with their approach to the grants hand holding the projects that they select and the the way that they actually onboard them to their culture and their organization at a very high level so they can actually participate in their governance participate in the decision making process so once the conviction model works like when a grant program approves the Grant and provides the feedback so how how can they track the other grant program in the ecosystem and see their feedback and like kind of generate this feedback loop on with for individuals and also the projects that the individuals are working on so that's kind of my Approach like we need more transparency in terms of like the grant funding we need more transparency in terms of like the the way that we build things together because we have this coordination which it's a human coordination we all know each other for a while we've been working together for a while and uh like this kind of accelerates us as well to a certain degree we have a specific understanding of what we're building I mean to provide that to the newcomers to this ecosystem to our ecosystem and the kind of neat so I feel like you know like built Brick by Brick and make sure that we have a solid infrastructure and onboard people to that um in a way yeah totally and from the perspective of a contributor or from a perspective of someone who is maybe newer to the ecosystem like do any of you have any like key takeaways or advice for how can someone get involved who wants to like grow an ecosystem um either like at a protocol level or like open source ecosystem in general or or built tools for Grant uh funding anyone can jump in yeah um now I find that I I I went such a bit on the bull versus bear Market situations and and it's crazy how um when it's a bull market you see a lot of I don't know dowels or contributors uh popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day but then when you move to the bear Market everyone's panicking and then everyone's thinking about the the token holder so it's interesting this perspective of how you go back and forth and I was actually thinking about what Simona said about that not all the organism needs to move at the same pace and then how do you manage like how how do you know when when it's time to cut that part to make sure that the hole survives to to not uh yeah do not kill the whole thing because of of one part and uh with that in mind um it's uh I think it's a it's a great time to to build and focus on providing value I think the the market is great for that it definitely uh cleans a lot of the of what Peter Pan was saying about the kumbayaos um so we'll we'll see what the what the real value is um but but yeah if you're a contributor and you want to join potentially find uh yeah an organization that you like that aligns with your values start to provide value and eventually you I think you will be picked up right now we like to say we like to say that those are our leader of uh leader fool instead of leaderless um but the truth is that I don't think that everyone wants to be a leader maybe uh so some people really like the framework to and be like yeah being told what to do so we need to find those Frameworks to make sure that we can onboard not just the the Giga brains and the and everyone that that can do that from that perspective so yeah I think that um I do think that now in the bear Market we're like laying the bricks we're laying the foundation for kind of the ecosystems to develop um in the next cycle if you will um and I actually think that there's a lot of projects that are currently navigating successions of power um for the first time or maybe for the second time and that there's actually a lot of opportunity for ecosystem leadership to kind of shine it's hard though because I think actually how you get involved is different from data down from ecosystem to ecosystem and often I think um uh grants or kind of like trying to achieve some sort of like funding stream through an organization is like a great way but there's something more deep there in which like finding um an ecosystem in a community that you align with principles wise and trying to kind of like participate in that Community for like and align yourself with that community so it's it's tough because I think that a lot of people like um for example like as we were trying to get like our grants program off and running there's a lot of people who like didn't know how to engage in the process and maybe we're like since we didn't understand how we really wanted to do grants a lot of people had expectations for how other people did grants and maybe we you know like miss a lot you know didn't meet people's expectations and so I think it's tough but I do think that there's like if I've seen like I the most Prime examples of ecosystem development in the radical ecosystem it's come from community members who just started like showing up and and being in the in forums and in the community and talking and asking questions who then started answering questions for other people asking questions who then started being you know the people that you'd go to when you want to distribute power permissions or Capital um and while for us we're still kind of like learning about what our ecosystem growth should be as we also figure out all the other things with radical it's I think that what we're trying to do is like lean into those like more one-to-one like individual like relationships of supporting people like growing into leaders within the community themselves and empowering um them as they emerge instead of again like gatekeeping it so um and I think that that comes with like a lot of like I feel like my answers are more about like what we can do to support people coming into the ecosystem better and it's like a lot of like like intentional program development you know of not just uh building an audience but building a community um it's a lot of like thinking about grants more intentionally not just as distributions of capital but as uh uh gateways into kind of like other means of development within a project um and also kind of embracing more like ecosystem relationships I think um and kind of like Partnerships just adds really quick um so basically I feel like also as a web Chief reagent let's say you know like kind of product project agnostic person the most important thing to the newborn board is I would say like first of all learn like to read a lot we have a lot of learning curves and that you need to go through but most important is mentorship like apprenticeship that's that's that's helped me a lot in web 2 web 3 in my life in general and I see like uh we have amazing leaders amazing people that actually cares about like what they're building their mission is uh how can we generate public goods how we can actually improve our society Prosper our society and if you can find these people and like just reach out to them and don't don't be even shy you know like I just ask them to mentally because I think like many people that I know great leaders in the psychosystem they would love to mention newcomers and like teach them what they know and learned because we learn as we teach and new teachers you learn you know so just want that on top of that I wanted to Circle back to yeah to the expectations and Leadership it seems that the default or the first one out there is the gold standard for anything which I think is extremely wrong an example is the delegates in maker though the first one just started the Forum thread saying this is my platform and we had a call with them and that was it so now every delegate in pretty much the whole industry has the platform which is just a forum thread and maybe a call introducing themselves to the community and delegates in this particular case could be so much more than that they could provide Frameworks they could provide reports they could provide so many more things and and all we're getting is just this oh I'm voting this for this reason and this applies to almost everything so try to think outside the box going back to Ops 1 try to provide value when you approach someone instead of give me something to do it's more like hey I thought that this could be of use what do you think if you think it's horrible try to get me in the in the right direction but it's extremely important to try to be proactive and and to help your Mentor or your team mentor to to help you otherwise you just take a burden that that no one was occurring I think we've come full circle to uh ecosystems being mycelium Network and all of us being mushrooms in the network and the dowels imitate nature as Simona pointed out earlier in the week and with that we only have five more minutes so if we want to take a couple of questions or just say some closing remarks or where can people find you all and connect with you after after Devcon can talk about where we connect and then I can hand my microphone off to anybody who has a question um but yeah you can follow radical radicals ridic on Twitter and you'll probably see be seeing a lot on our Forum radical.com Community about the transition I write discourse like this is my job now discourse posts and so we have a lot of really cool ones that are kind of like outlining our transition and a lot of really cool stuff there that's happening in the open uh in the open and you can follow me at Abby Abbey underscore tick home t-i-t-c-o-m-b because I also tweet about this a lot awesome you can reach out to inverter Network and also help ergin TR I got a haircut so the profile picture doesn't represent it but you can still find that um yeah thank you I'm 0x7u4m which is Juan just in lead speak yeah I have a very common name so all the combinations were already taken sorry Mom [Music] mine's just Anna Alexa K on Twitter and telegram so anytime feel free to reach out and continue this conversation and I'm guessing that this is our cue to get off the stage you have time for one question yeah totally Louise hi yep um you were mentioning about like these difference between symbiotic relationships uh instead of check imbalances and I would love to know like uh could you expand a little bit more on that and how how would that look like uh yeah so I think that it's about um I think well I say this word way too much but I think it's about resilience right and that like when you look at our natural world actually everything is built off of not really checks and balances like you I think that that's kind of more of like a competitive way to look at it like when something spins out of control something checks it however when you look at like natural symbiotic relationships um the difference is because checking balance is like constraining power um and uh kind of creating means of like limiting power where symbiosis is creating relationships that grow and that Thrive and that like spawn um and I think that that's kind of the difference in which I think symbiosis symbiotic relationships are often less of this like linear um check and balance and more of this like Dynamic exponential growth um at least from my limited Research into microbiology um and I also think that but I do think that this concept of like thriving versus constraining is the difference that I see in which when you think of an ecosystem you you see an ecosystem not again is this like um I mean some people do again it goes back to like natural selection if like what you think about like kind of biology in general but I think newer takes on biology are looking at ecosystems as these like very diverse interconnected networks um that are all building on each other and are all and I think we're now realizing the interdependencies um and I think that's those interdependencies are not like a check in a balance they're kind of a dependency on each other to survive and so I think that that's a way more for me a more inspiring take on kind of how we can be building ecosystems in general because if you're working on interdependencies instead of like one person checking versus the other um I think that you can build more resilient ecosystems because we're focusing and it's like how we it's honestly something that we embody and I think in the ethereum space off the bat right is that we want to be composable we want to be modular we want to be supporting each other's ecosystems because together we're more resilient together we are this like headless listing that is ethereum that is like web3 and that's more of a symbiotic relationship than like a check and balance kind of like competitive thing so I think it's coming from like a personal opinion but totally makes sense I think what makes sense to me is like it's switching the model from like one to many relationship where it's like one person at the top having connections to many people to many to many relationships and it's the bonds between the it's it's the bonds between the nodes in the network versus like one person towards many people any more questions great thank you so much for coming and we're sticking around and at the end of Devcon everyone wow thank you all for being the last panel amazing