Hyperactive Public Goods Funding (HPGF) Ecosystem Support Machine (ESM)

The goal of our Ecosystem Support Machine is to refine the complex of public goods funding mechanisms - roughly split into prospective, progressive and retroactive funding - into a set of impact-community optimized flows of reciprocal benefit between the mechanisms and the communities themselves. That being said, there is no mechanism more relevant than hypercerts to our first focus of the investigative commons (the global impact community which includes journalists, data scientists and OSINT). ESM envisions an emerging market of pluralistic impact journalist networks whose funding is centered around the production of hypercerts, and whose funding processes can iteratively test and improve MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, Verification) for the hypercerts community as a whole.

The rounds will be executed via fusion of many OSS tools in the HPGF ecosystem (hypercerts, DeReSy, QF, EasyRetroPGF, etc.). Some specific tasks we hope to complete in the coming months most relevant to this round:

• Facilitate impact journos to create hypercerts and legible web3 identities or entities, as the case may be;

• Aggregate reviews of hypercerts using DeReSy and other emergent MRV projects;

• Implement a community-curated RPGF round directed at experimental climate journalism with an emphasis on data journalism and cosmolocal reporting tactics;

• Collaborate with existing journo relations to build out a series of rounds that approach a full range of experimental HPGF tactics centered around hypercerts.

Overview

For further detail and clarity, refer to our full proposal: https://hackmd.io/@esm/B1gwLvj0T

Hyperactive Public Goods Funding (HPGF) is a fusion of some of the most innovative elements of the public goods space. The flow finds synergy between prospective crowdfunding, impact tracking and evaluation, and participatory retroactive public goods funding, fusing them by way of rigorous impact validation strategies and other open peer review processes, with the broad utility of Hypercerts found near the center. The goal of HPGF is to generate a virtuous cycle that, over time, will cohere enough to attract large pools of capital into the markets whose terminus is not profit extraction, but rather the judgment of impact by open process and participatory bodies interested in the flourishing of prosocial enterprises.

As it stands, this flow is only recently coming into shape. Because it's born from a concert of already complex and ambitious initiatives, the flow has a high risk of remaining inaccessible or even incoherent to the communities most in need of its innovation - indeed, at this point in development the acccessiblity and coherence of the flow is a question even for the builders shaping it. The HPGF Ecosystem Support Machine (ESM) is a workgroup dedicated to solving this problem by locating friction points where focused efforts in one domain (e.g., user onboarding) generate reciprocal clarity and coherence across the entire HPGF project ecosystem. Our work focuses on mending some of the natural fragmentation in the current public goods space, generating bridges not just between siloed web3 teams but between the public goods community and those communities outside of the web3 space that would benefit from their mechanisms immediately.

Our first community of concentration in this effort is what we call the global investigative commons - that is, the journalists, researchers and data scientists that navigate the uncertain terrain of finding truth outside of the sanction of nation-states and private enterprise. The parallel interests as well as the incidental convergence represented by this community's funding crisis make it an excellent first choice to stage our efforts, but the onboarding, concierging and explanatory work it will demand is sure to generate positive externalities that will extend far beyond journalism. Our workgroup is thus most concerned with finding the interventions that are most animated by mutual alignment and a shared problem space in order to develop HPGF Ecosystem Support output that has multidimensional benefit to those inside and outside.

Contrary to the thesis of "take care of our own systems first," we are of the belief that richly engaging and refining materials to onboard impact creators into the public goods space will have a crucial reciprocal benefit for the space in its development capacities. We propose a feedback loop where, with the help of a neutral intermediary, ecosystem developers and new communities can grow together, shaped to the strategic contingencies of each community as they make use of the HPGF toolkit to their own ends.

First Focus: The Global Investigative Commons

While this group's work is intended to be relevant to a wide range of public goods oriented communities, it's our belief that building around a monolithic and abstract user will blind us to the important nuances that will make HPGF a viable force for impact fundng. We will only find the common patterns if we derive them out from specific deployments. To this end, we've chosen the global independent journalism community (what one group calls "the investigative commons") as our initial focus for onboarding, empowering, and tailoring an HPGF toolkit around.

Our team has connections to members of this community who are deeply embedded in the funding polycrisis in independent journalism, particularly in the area of the climate coverage. Both the climate change and the journalism funding crisis have acted as catalysts of experimentation in decentralization as well as reappraisal of core values around open source production, the value of public goods and the viability of commons institutions in our society. The latter, perhaps even more saliently, has instigated a growing dialogue around impact tracking, highlighting issues including the networked nature of impact and the relative value of qualitative and quantitative data for verifying impact.

In short, the independent media establishment is experiencing an ordeal that makes for striking convergence with the concerns of HPGF and the broader web3 project. When framed within the larger conversation around the metacrisis and the defensive technologies necessary to address it, it becomes even more clear why this community will make a powerful ally in charting out the real life stakes of Hyperactive Public Goods Funding.

Impact and Deliverables

For more on problem statements and hypotheses, refer to our full proposal:https://hackmd.io/@esm/B1gwLvj0T

1. HPGF Meta Flow By placing the various elements of the public goods stack into a modular, user-oriented flow we will a) give needed coherence to the non-web3 native communities that are most in need of these tools, b) unlock the power of each tool while highlighting areas for intervention and improvement that may have remained invisible to projects in their silos. We have already completed the first version of a detailed diagram of this Meta (see Initial Blueprint of HPGF Meta).
2. Bespoke Reciprocal Concierge Services We will act as hands-on advisors for native and non-native web3 communities alike, interpreting and clarifying tools and their contexts to users who may otherwise avoid these crucial funding and impact tracking instruments, especially those users whose work falls through the cracks of traditional funding environments. Our success at onboarding individuals to stages of the HPGF flow will be a good metric of success.
3. Technical and User Experience Documentation: A substantial part of our effort will be directed towards facilitating technical discourse among project teams, capturing these discussions, and transforming them into an open knowledge repository. The outcome will be user guides and documentation designed for easy navigation and accessibility, empowering users with the knowledge to effectively engage with these new tools.
4. Protocol Experience and Editorial Content: Furthering the technical aspect of our deliverables, we aim to refine the details surrounding the mechanics of hyperactive public goods funding. This endeavor will culminate in the publication of editorial blog posts, high-level synopses, and detailed explorations of dilemmas and problem spaces, all crafted in collaboration with active/potential users and product teams.
5. Collaboration with JournoDAO A pivotal component of our project involves direct collaboration with JournoDAO, a collective of journalists focused on the implications of the web3 toolkit for the nuanced challenges of free speech, objective truth, and the technological facilitation of high-integrity news dissemination. By partnering with this group as a primary intermediary, we hope to zero in on distinct elements of the crisis in journalism that might be abstracted out into protocols of impact tracking and peer review well-suited to the HPGF flow.
6. Community Engagement with Global Investigative Commons: In order to keep the above pursuits specific and oriented toward terminal goals, they will be undertaken in the context of an engagement with the Global Investigative Commons, both through contacts in JournoDAO as well contacts in the climate journalism and data science world that happen to be concentrated in Berlin (represented in diagram as the Berliners). A further metric of success will be progress in the dialogue between web3 and journalism, so that conversations around the funding crisis in that community are informed by the nuances of the web3 HPGF toolkit.

Our aspiration extends beyond the immediate project outcomes, encompassing a desire to share our learnings and successes with a diverse audience that spans both Web3 enthusiasts and real-world communities. This endeavor is geared towards maximizing the societal impact of all our efforts, ensuring that the benefits of hyperactive public goods funding are accessible, relevant, and responsive to a wide demographic.

Progress so far

Some products of our focus thus far:

• Provisioned a central chat to begin general information sharing internally within the emerging HPGF ecosystem;
• Facilitated conversations across project teams to discover some initial shared paths forward;
• Collaborative planning with JournoDAO toward repeatable impact funding rounds for impact journalism;
• Began inventory and map of the tools and flows common in the HPGF ecosystem;
• Opened up sensemaking channels with impact journalist contingent in Berlin, including a major transnational network of progressive journalists.