In today’s digital economy the gap for funding public goods often falls on the shoulders of governments and large corporations, the state and the market. But what if open protocol networks could be a source? The use of blockchain to fund public goods is just one aspect of a larger movement towards a commons-based economy, and the foundations for this relies on data ownership and privacy.
As part of Namada’s experiment to retroactively fund public goods I would like to nominate my organization, Amber Initiative, and varies groups in my community that exist to rethink, redesign and exchange value in a bottom-up approach. We are a creative collective experimenting to create resilient infrastructure for a regenerative civilization. We exist in the space of imagination as a dynamic exchange of ideas and people prototyping them.
The considerations of these nominations would fall under the specifications public goods funding as defined here: Namada Specs - Namada
- Social research, art, and philosophy Social research, art, and philosophy covers funding for artistic expression, philosophical investigation, and social/community research (not marketing) exploring the relationship between humans and technology. Possible funding forms could include independent artist grants, institutional funding, funding for specific research resources (e.g. travel expenses to a location to conduct a case study), and similar.
- External public goods External public goods covers funding for public goods explicitly external to the Namada and Namada ecosystem, including carbon sequestration, independent journalism, direct cash transfers, legal advocacy, etc. Possible funding forms could include direct purchase of tokenised assets such as carbon credits, direct cash transfers (e.g. GiveDirectly), institutional funding (e.g. Wikileaks), and similar.
Nominee:
- Amber Initiative
Project Partners
- Living Data Pod (biodesign, citizen science, decentralized science, biomaterials, climate adaptation, architectural ecologies)
- Ocean Imagineer (ocean restoration, biodesign, carbon sequestration, green hydro energy)
- Nuxulk Village Rebuild (bioregional collaborator, land sovereignty, indigenous governance, carbon sequestration)
- Jogl (decentralized science, biocommons)
- Compost Magazine (independent journalism on socially just digital technologies)
- eQualitie (decentralized internet services in support of a more equal and equitable networks)
A common thread for these projects is autonomy and we believe we can begin to center value around the needs of a community and the living systems we belong to.
This is an initial proposal and we welcome feedback and thoughts.
Thank you for this opportunity and looking forward to this experiment.