# Public Goods Coalition

## Motivation

Over the last four years, Gitcoin has continuously identified new ways to push forward a variety of models for public goods funding in web3 most notably [quadratic funding](https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html).

In this time, Gitcoin has contributed to taking the meme of public goods mainstream, and used it to fund projects like ethers.js, POAP, Snapshot, Uniswap, WalletConnect, Yearn, 1inch, Prysmatic Labs, Nimbus, and more.

While the *impact* of quadratic funding has grown massively as funded projects have begun to power the next wave of web3, the relative size of the matching pools and the total number of projects that have committed to actually funding public goods beyond the rhetoric has remained relatively small.

There are two reasons for this:

1) Although Gitcoin has gained a lot of [legitimacy](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html) (furthered by our transition to a community governed DAO this year) there is still work to be done to create a consistent, sustainable and organized coalition as originally envisioned by the [funder’s league](https://gyazo.com/e6846e72ac0b32d4f7fa2de013c0e94a) we started memeing in 2018. This is partly because of the time cost for any DAO being in such a coalition relative to the amount of skin they have in the game.

2) Although quadratic funding has been tested, it is still not quite ready to be scaled to tens of millions of dollars of funding per quarter. This is partly related to the fact that we are still *experimenting* to ensure we have the best possible solution around sybil-resistance and that we have a variety of possible approaches that we can show work best for different kinds of grantees.

So how can we scale the work we're doing faster? How can we fund more experiments in a coordinated way?

## Defining and Manifesting a New Coalition

### Purpose

The Public Goods Coalition is aimed at finding new ways to run experiments for allocating funding to public goods in a participatory, grassroots way.

The coalition will have the following structure:

### Coalition Structure

To accelerate experimentation, we would like to first accelerate the growing interest in public goods across the Ethereum ecosystem. To do this, we propose creating a meta coalition of funders (DAOs) with the following membership requirements:

1. Make a giving pledge of the lesser of $5m or 1% of treasury
2. Commit to building out a working group or other form of subDAO within their governance structure dedicated to public goods funding (if one doesn't exist)

In exchange for their commitment to public goods, DAOs may appoint 1-3 members to represent their interests in the DAO, with one member on the coalition multisig and up to 3 appointed members holding a non-transferrable NFT for off-chain voting on proposals. This allows the coalition to be participatory while practicing [governance minimization](https://fehrsam.xyz/blog/governance-minimization).

To ensure streamlined operations, by default Gitcoin commits to taking on the overhead of drafting initial guidelines for members and helping to steward initial proposals. However, any member who wishes to participate in this process has equal right to do so.

The coalition will ideally start by including at least five projects that have clearly been committed to funding public goods as part of their direct mandate. Critically, at the risk of repetition, each member will have equal weight in all decision-making, and any member can propose an experiment to fund (see scope for more details).

Post-launch, the hope is that a number of other projects will commit to taking an active role in the coalition, both in terms of providing funding and proposing new experiments, especially those that have participated in Gitcoin Grants as matching funders before and have already taken small steps towards stewarding web3 towards the public good.

### What is in Scope?

Defining what a public good is can be tricky and it has been an [active conversation](https://otherinter.net/research/positive-sum-worlds/) over the last year. Rather than creating a committee that sets these definitions, we believe the community should be deciding together.

To that end, we recommend scoping decision-making to how value flows through *meta-public goods* mechanisms i.e. experiments and mechanisms that distribute public goods according to community sentiment.

**To clarify, no funding will be distributed to any entity for operations. Instead, coalition members would decide which mechanisms deploy funding to other broader public goods.**

These mechanisms can include:

- Streaming via token curated lists
- Open community Moloch instances
- Quadratic funding
- Retro-public goods related tooling
- NFT auction mechanisms for public goods
- Yield redirection tooling
- And other emergent dynamics

A second-order benefit of proceeding this way is that *any new public goods funding mechanism* can apply for funding in a credibly neutral space where DAOs can come together, rather than individual grants systems or decentralized mechanisms that may be biased towards their own tooling.

### Measuring Results

It wouldn't be prudent to run experiments without having a sense of what we want to achieve.

There are two fundamental outcomes we want to see from the coaltion (although this is also up to member discussion):

1) We're still early in terms of the number of public goods funding mechanisms we're seeing, and so the number of experiments comparing and contrasting these mechansisms is limited. There's an opportunity to help measure and collate results to determine where DAOs should send public goods funding for maximum impact.
2) By leveraging new mechanisms and creating new ways to explore the boundaries of public goods (and come to consensus on what we want to fund) we can more easily identify goods we may have previously missed or not considered, giving us an empirical way to determine the domain of public goods we want to fund in a centralized fashion. This fact finding has already been something we've seen occur at small scale from quadratic funding experiments alone.

### How to Proceed?

How we proceed is entirely up to the community. Here's what would be required:

1. Buy-in from five initial funders (including Gitcoin)
2. Building out 2-3 funding mechanisms beyond Gitcoin that we know would request funding using the simple committee model above, for credible neutrality
3. Collaboration between parties on a game-changing giving pledge

### Collaborations We'd Love to See

There are a number of public goods initiatives already that we would love to see coordinating, beyond just Gitcoin. Some of these potential emerging DAOs were outlined in Kevin's post [here](https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/a-vision-for-a-pluralistic-civilizational-scale-infrastructure-for-funding-public-goods/9503).