ZOMG Spending: go, go, go

[nuttycom]

To be clear, I think that this approach could be complementary to a more standard grant-in-advance based approach, not that it should be a total replacement. Even with “traditional” grants, you have the risk of awarding funds to compelling grant-writers; at least with a frequent-bounties approach, you’re awarding the funds for work that has actually been performed. And quadratic funding hopefully makes it more likely that genuine value recognized by many will be more highly rewarded than someone who only does a good job writing up the work.

[Tsupportisharmful]

@nuttycom

could be complementary to a more standard grant-in-advance based approach, not that it should be a total replacement.

Thanks for pointing this out. I like your idea better when I think about the complementary payment as a bonus not a replacement. As long as the ratio of the final payment to the upfront payment is not too large (making my concerns more relevant) I feel pretty good about your idea especially because ZOMG is in a good financial position currently.

[holmesworcester]

@Anton1

I’m just asking you to clarify how the ZOMG members understand this should work. Now there are several funded projects for a certain period of support, will the support continue after the expiration of the deadlines, who will follow the pricing and accounting (you need to calculate how much will be spent on monthly maintenance of already approved projects), there are also risks of refusal or errors, what to do with them, will there be claims in court? In my opinion, there is too much of a gap and there is no gain over the classic enterprise scheme.

This comes up in the nonprofit space a lot, and in the VC space.

I think the typical thing is to give smaller amounts at first, speculatively, and then to increase the level of funding as the projects grow and become more mature and certain.

So when we give a grant, we’re giving it expecting to provide as much more funding in the future if the work goes well. Or at least that’s how I look at it in most cases.

(Not all cases are like this. For example, there might be some piece of code that is a major lift to get working, but once working can be sustainably maintained by ECC or ZF. In this case, it’s truly one-time funding.)

Some projects can seek their own sources of funding, e.g. Patreon / OpenCollective, grants from other entities that fund privacy tech, or some revenue model. In this cases we might fund them at the beginning and reduce funding over time.

We’ve also discussed taking equity in projects, though this might require a new ZIP, I’m not sure.

The one gain over the classic enterprise scheme is that there can be more clarity about what the money is going to fund, and who decides where it’s funded. This clarity and trust might come at the cost of efficiency, but I think the bet that the ZIP is making in creating the ZOMG is that the transparency and decentralization of power created by the democratic process is worth it.

[holmesworcester]

@nuttycom

Then, at the end of each month, or maybe each quarter, each contributor to project Y writes up a “grant application” citing the work that they performed & had merged during that period. Then, community matching donations are used to “vote” on how that period’s pool of funds is distributed among the people who actually did the work. Those people could be independent actors, or people working in groups and distributing whatever funds they received for the work however they want internally.

This is a really good idea. We could also use a more centrally determined system for qualifying the work, where we ask a project lead to verify that each contribution was valuable, or at least take their opinion into consideration.

[Anton1]

Let’s see who is right in half a year. Maybe show me how it should work.

[Anton1]

Now everything is clear to me, we see a really working diagram! ZOMG proved to everyone that and how it should work, keep it up!