Hi Crowd!
Almost 7 years ago I co-wrote a book about philanthropy and the importance of open. Open principles, open source, and generally building, failing, and learning in the open. 7 years feels both too long and too short when I think about it, so much has changed since then and so much is exactly the same.
The book, 50 Shades of Green: Reimagining Philanthropy, was part of the work we did with the Shuttleworth Foundation, which has since shut down but 2/3 of the directors have continued on as Arising Matters and are hosting a pdf of it on their new site. I also put the text (maybe missing some of the images) up on github for quick access to specific parts. Arising Matters also hosts a “10 lessons learned from…” essay which is a very worthwhile read.
The high level points are a lot of philanthropy is ineffective, it’s done for the wrong reasons, with the wrong goals, monitoring the wrong metrics. And the result of that is a lot of money that should be spent on fixing/building is spent on talking about fixing/building or writing reports about fixing/building or trying to get additional funding that the fixing/building can actually get addressed eventually at some point. Maybe. Fear of making mistakes and thus losing funding prevents forward motion. Alternatively, finding small teams or individuals who are passionate about something and freeing them up to work on it with the resources they need is actually far more impactful. Redefining failures as potentials learning opportunities for better results next time is powerful and encourages imagining big solutions. And that’s the point, looking at impact rather than arbitrary accounting metrics makes a world of difference.
This is especially important with open source which is notoriously hard to fund, but often provides the foundation and framework that all kinds of industry and commercial projects are built on. This type of support was world changing for us at Safecast. Our job was measuring and openly publishing environmental data, but we were spending all day trying to raise money to pay rent and buy equipment. Being able to just focus on measuring and openly publishing environmental data made our work possible. In the book we talk about plenty of other projects, and projects built on those projects. Sadly the need for Shuttleworth didn’t go away when Shuttleworth went away. There’s lots of passionate people trying to build things in the open, but struggling to make ends meet.
It’s a big problem with any kind of new tech / the web because the passionate builders are rarely the flashy main characters and funding usually starts with those types. I don’t mean to imply that the main characters aren’t passionate or builders, but usually they aren’t any more. Their origin stories might include all kinds of passionate building, but these days they usually spend more time in board rooms than white boarding. If you know what I mean. Ethereum is a perfect example of that, there’s a dozen well funded foundations focused on Ethereum and they spend the bulk of their time thinking about policy and politics and are largely removed and potentially unaware of the actual people building their lives on and around it. There are no large scale foundations funding artists, funding people building tools for artists, or funding people building tools for artists communities. There’s a bunch of people building open tools, and a handful of commercial companies using those tools and sometimes releasing some too, but generally the artists and builders have to find their own way to live.
Jalil Wahdatehagh is a perfect example of this. For years now Jalil has been solving problems, fixing bugs, and shipping apps for everyone to use free of charge. Open sourced, in the open. Not the least of that is EVM.NOW (built with YGG) which is a full featured and beautiful block explorer that I’ve entirely switched to over Etherscan. The amount of things he’s built for the CryptoPunk community is hard to keep track of. He’s a machine. He’s also just a guy trying to build stuff with a family to support who ends up having to sell things from his personal collection to pay bills. And sure it’s cool to have Jonathan Mann write a song about you, the circumstances not so much.
In a perfect world there would be a well funded foundation charged specifically with finding these incredible people and giving them a runway to get things done. If you just skim the book I mentioned above you’ll learn about dozens of projects that were able to do amazing things because an opportunity like that was made available for them. It’s especially frustrating when paired with news of unimaginable extraction, there’s so much money flying around in this space and such a relatively small amount could make such a difference. In the book we talk about a $5M challenge, as that was the annual budget for the foundation which covered 12-15 fellows/projects and gave them the freedom to focus on making a difference in the world. There’s so much potential here, it’s hard to see it lack the support to develop.