Growing Community Ecosystems: Quadratic Funding, Project Incubation, and Web2 Empowerment

Transcript

he [Music] testing testing hi everyone awesome okay I'll just cool and we even have the timer here is the sound good more or less yeah let's get started then hi everyone uh

super excited to be here in prag with you today my name is Teresa vova I'm coming from the regenerative Finance space and I've been based for the last five years in Colombia so I'm super excited to come here today and share some of the things that we've been doing with the uh local community in Colombia to to kind of grow the the regenerative uh meme let's say so the agenda for for today's talk is first going to be um maybe talking about the why a little bit like why we're even talking about this what's the purpose of it and the second part we're going to look at specific strategies uh on how to grow a local community with free uh specific ones highlighted so the track uh we're on um

one of the tracks of the conference is solar pank so I kind of wanted to use the solar pank uh concept as a lens for my presentation today as well so what is actually solar Punk solar Punk is basically an optimistic vision of the future that connects three different things um Innovation or technology sustainability and then community so solar prank basically looks to create this uh beautiful community that that coordinates and collaborates to create a sustainable future for technology that's the that's the most basic explanation of solar bank and solar Bank was born as a concept in around 2008 2010 some people say that it was actually born on Reddit you'll see that uh it resonates a lot in popular culture you must have seen a lot

of the AI maybe images with these beautiful green green cities so that's basically uh the concept again the three pillars are sustainable living Innovative technology and Community collaboration and um I found this uh quote by uh bill mckin who's uh a American Environ environmentalist and he says that the technology we need most badly is the technology of community the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done and if you were to translate this into the very free lingo you must have seen uh it on Twitter it's basically saying it's all coordination so I'm here to argue today that maybe the the community bit the community piece of the puzzle is the

most important work that we can be doing today both in the you know like solar pank regenerative space but also in any ecosystem that you're trying to build because if you build you know powerful technology if you have good like sustainability structures that's still not enough if you don't if you fail to bring your community together and find ways for them to collaborate and coordinate e effectively so um again I think that a robust strong Community is basically the most important pillar of a solar Bank future and I think it's because of three main reasons first is that a strong community can help build a resiliance structure which means that you know if you collaborate on the local level if you have different networks again of collaboration you can find ways to

prevent or uh react quickly to any crisis be it social crisis or environmental crisis so for example rather than relying on you know Global Supply chains if you have Community Gardens it's much easier to always adapt and you know waiting for example in case of covid waiting for Global deliveries when they fail uh the next one is sustainability and that's something similar like obviously if you're working on the local level it allows you to coordinate around Community Gardens V management uh you know local uh you can exchange energy uh and things like that so that's a that's the second one and then participation and I would say also diversity because a community that really understands itself really can act

upon its needs so this these are the the main three pillars or or like why uh strong communities matter in a better vision for for our future future um I think the interesting bit is that with blockchain uh technology we can actually make this happen in ways we never thought possible and I really believe that blockchain is the ultimate coordination tool it allows us uh to create uh decentralized structures for trust it allows us to create local economies with our own cryptocurrency we can uh you know adopt different Dow models for governance um have transparent Supply chains there's a lot and to to bring this into like a real life example of something that I really like one of my colleague uh former

colleagues uh was working on is that there is this city in Mexico con called San Miguel deyende and this city is super touristic has been touristic for a while beautiful historical city in Mexico and what has been happening over the past two decades is that um there's been a heavy Reliance on monoculture which means that there's this corn growing around the tourism the heavy tourism also has obviously you know um had it stall on the city infrastructure on um you know like the availability of of resources and and all that so the locals have been realizing more and more that something needs to change unless they really want to succumb to the negative impacts of of climate action and you know like um have significant

decrease in quality of life and availability of resources so what they did with blockchain is that they created basically a common treasury where everyone puts as you know you know different amount of their resources let's say 1% of their of their profits the the farmers and all that and they collectively govern this treasury to invest in things like regenerative agriculture uh permaculture projects or you know workshops for for example ecotourism so it's it's really cool to see what they can do because otherwise it's really difficult for us to put money into something we don't trust like right if we all decided that we wanted to build a house together it would probably be difficult to trace that the relationship would be very BL but if we decided to do that with

blockchain it would be much easier to navigate because we can always Trace everything that happened uh on chain so um just the point again here is that uh blockchain allows us to unlock many different possibilities and a lot of these experiments are already happening on the local level and there are probably you know like hundreds of local communities working on stuff like this already but I've just like highlighted a few that I've interacted with or known so there's a traditional Dream Factory which is a basically an Eco Village in Portugal that's kind of bringing a lot of these experiments to life on a smaller scale uh I think we have someone here that actually visited it so it would be cool if if you can share a little bit after I think that that would be super interesting then there is the green pill Network and the green pill network was

born out of work of Kevin aukee who is kind of the leader of the regenerative space I guess like not self-proclaimed but one of the the biggest fought leaders in the space and he believes that green pill you know it doesn't have to be the red pill or the blue pill but the green pill so like how can we take the green pill to to start seeing things from a more sustainability regenerative perspective so green pill Network basically starts local communities around the world and they're implementing different structures around Community Action and impact verification so it's really cool because they're implementing stuff like hypers search protocol which is uh basically a new like impact verification and tracking Primitives then there is refid and refid is also the community that I'm

representing that's uh around the reg generative Finance uh concept and refi has as its goal to basically regenerate the planet and I know that sounds super super vague but one of the ultimate like uh Avenues towards that is basically acquiring land to protect it but Bri has like a large C of activities but mostly kind of executed through local notes so REI is the matter structure and there is uh refi Costa Rica there is refi Portugal there is REI medine the one I'm representing and and many more then there is ethereum communities and I think they're very interesting because etherum practice also an etherum Community you know maybe it manifests itself through this event once a year but there are communities that do have

constant engagement for example I know that etherum Bogota in Colombia is a huge etherum Community doing great work so something also uh worth checking out and seeing it Mexico is also a big one then there is do Al cities who are like local popup communities so that means that they're not uh you know permanently placed uh somewhere around the world but they they kind of travel and and nomad I think that they have run very interesting experiments around like onchain reputation as well they do a lot of collaborations with like local entities whenever um they go somewhere so also if you are into this topic you should check them out now um ref medine again is the community that I'm representing mid is the second largest city of Colombia and uh over a year ago

we started uh our local no there and have been kind of working on different stuff uh that I want to share more about so first uh strategy to grow a local community is Project incubation and I think project incubation really is something that ties closely to the value proposition of your community um it's really what you have to offer to people it's like what value are you creating on the local level I wanted to specifically say project incubation because I think a lot of communities look at incubation of people incubation of talent which I think is super important but it's just the first step for example if in bot I think again is a great community and um they really

are raising the next generation of developers in Colombia but I think that the next level would be to create projects that can bring back value and so to to ecosystem because if you're just uh cultivating Talent it's great but it's very likely that the talent is going to go elsewhere after but how can you capture this this Talent this this value in your community so project incubation project incubation by by that I mean basically supporting restro project in your community there's different ways to do that you know like even providing value for networking which means basically acting as the bridge as the space where you can bring people together it's uh doing things like Innovation Labs hackaton um you know like different different activities

like that this is kind of um an overview of of all the let's say project incubation issues and problems and tips um what we did specifically in refi meeting that that has worked really well for us was a hakon so basically we sponsored a hack of Anum Colombia hackaton and out of the 12 or 13 projects we were really happy to see that eight decided to participate in the retive finance track so what we gained out of that was first awareness of our brand and the regenerative uh Concepts but also connection to to new Talent allowing us to you know map different people in our community that could either serve as mentors or mentees but also you know future kind of pool of

interesting ideas so I think the project incubation stage or the the the this specific approach is really powerful for everyone to create an innovation engine in your community so if you're not doing that like think about okay what is the value proposition we are thinking in uh about in our community and again doesn't apply only to solar pun futures or Regin Futures what is the value that you're bring in your community what what are you know doing in the long term how are you connecting the stakeholders in your in your ecosystem so when we did that hackaton um again we were super happy with the results um there was not a project that we decided to you know like support in the long term very actively but another project uh from our community we actually decided to to give them a grant and you know help them find

investors and stuff so I really think that's the there the next steps that allows you also to make your community sustainable and capture value within itself and it's really interesting because in the long term technically you could even have like a model around it like really being an incubator basically and um you know deciding on an agreement to capture some part of the Project's profits should they become successful um obviously when it comes to challenges some of these things can be very resource heavy um I think the biggest challenge that I've seen is uh that the project stewards can experience burnout because obviously you know doing this all over again and investing in these things is it can be very difficult and

often like requires significant human resources so I would say that it's very important to make sure that you're managing this well find ways to reward the stewards to I guess decentralize the structure a little bit and all that um actually that's what I have as one of the tips as well for uh communities to consider creating some kind of reward structure uh for the membership for engagement um I know we have someone from guilt here as well and we talked about it a moment ago so um I think it's very important to to create a balanced structure that really allows you to to understand who is the who are the main contributors how you can support them how you can maybe reward them so that they can uh stay in

the community in the long term and actively contribute to it next up uh the second strategy that I want to share is web to Partnerships so again no matter what community you're trying to build it's really useful to kind of tap into the community of others right and I think in the free space we always make the mistakes of you know associating oursel with like other R free projects and looking for for grants in the wepre space only and it's great because there's a lot of you know potential and a lot of lot of power in that but I think what works really well as well is to expand beyond that and uh what we did specifically in mid again you know a group of five people that are interested in blockchain for good we have

no connections we have no you know like actual I don't know like infrastructure so like how can we actually make this happen and we realize that doing that for we two partners was one of one of the most powerful thing that we could do so specifically we are collaborating with an organization that's called salvat and it's an NGO looking to uh they they plant trees they work on Community Gardens and things like that and what they are lacking is actually you know like often like Manpower like having people that would go and participate in their activities and what we are lacking is the opportunities to go do that so finding this like collaboration collaborations was very powerful because again what we got out of it was opportunities to regenerate

and what what they got out of it is like the the people to participate and a lot of marketing and I think that very interesting aspect and I do have it somewhere there with the with the benefits is the the crypto onboarding part as well because um you would think that okay it was really a beneficial partnership for us and you know they actually connected us with the mayor's office and now we do have our own Community guardiance as well but we would not be able to do it ourselves but what we did for them was also very powerful and I'm not just talking about us tagging them in like Twitter pictures uh what we did for them specifically was that we helped them on board on different web free platforms such as gitcoin and they did participate in the gg8 and gg9 rounds which are the gitcoin

Grands rounds that happened last year and they managed to raise a few thousand dollars which in Colombia for their normal fundraising would be a lot of money so um helping that with that as well I think was very powerful and I would encourage you whether your looking to partner again with your ref free project or in your local community always to think about creating positive some games meaning if I give something what what what can or like if I get something what can I give back how can we all benefit from this how can this not be just like okay let's handshake and you know like uh sign a contract and that's it like how can we always look at ways to connect our partners with someone else and stuff and I think this these things are are very powerful

because you're not just creating yeah like a part parip pool but really valuable connections that can help you achieve your mission whatever it is um last but not least actually I think this is the most interesting one because I think um who here knows about quadratic funding already okay so I'll I'll just do like a quick explainer uh quadratic funding is a way to fund what matters that's the like easiest explanation and what is cool about it is that it does so in a very Democratic way so normally if if you went to if you were as a community to fund something and you know like um it would be very likely that somebody would somebody would be able to

contribute 5 somebody 50 somebody 5,000 if they wanted to and in these mechanisms normally what happens is that the person with the most resources has biggest say in what's going to happen right so quadratic funding shift this around quadratic funding says that it doesn't matter how much you contribute as much as the number of wot AKA donations approach gets so it's really interesting because it's a mechanism first to fund something but also to understand what a community wants so for example if we were here to fund uh to run a quadratic funding round we could say okay what are maybe the speakers that we want to invite you know and we could collectively vote on that but vote by donations so let's say that everyone

donates one Euro to a speaker and then we can see and maybe allocate any extra budget that we have to that speaker because collectively the the votes the number of votes was high highest but also again votes matter over uh amounts so it's a very interesting mechanism and maybe many communities have been leveraging it already this is the formula but don't ask me to explain it to you um it's kind of tricky uh or like as you see complex but there is a calculator online um I think it's on what the WTF uh is qf you can find a calculator then you can test how it would look in your community but again it's a very interesting concept so um another way to to grow your community and to help it fund itself is to run you

know small local quadratic funding rounds and it's really interesting because um normally let's say that you start a community here in prag and you want to run meetups you'll see that you're running on this treadmill of getting like new sponsorship new donations for every single single Meetup and you're like always on this treadmill and it's really difficult to get tired of it but with qf for example you'll see how much the community that you've built values your your projects and you can find ways to to partner with someone else so you can get a matching pull from a different project but also uh some uh income from your community so it's a very creative way to to fund things uh that matter to your community this is this is the kind of overview um so we

haven't launched uh a qf as refin medine yet but there have been uh quadratic funding rounds happening in Colombia and I think they were quite successful because we managed to raise 10,000 for it so $10,000 were the matching pool and then we let people vote with donations and based on those donations we distributed the $10,000 uh on on what was popular so I think that was very very successful and we had like 20 projects participate there is also uh I think the the refi note in Thailand is running their cure fronts and they're raising money actively but it's a really good thing to combine with the other strategies that I mentioned for example if you find a partner that is willing to to donate

$5,000 or something like that you can use it as the the matching pool for the quadratic funding and it's much more powerful than you know normal ESG activities because the community can directly see that this is the project that's donating this is the project that allows us to fund what matters to us it's basically big companies giving money to a community and deciding the letting the community to decide what they want to do with it rather than the company deciding oh I want to donate to to this NGO so it's really powerful if you make it work again it's now the big thing in the in the VB free space and you'll definitely come across it when it comes to funding op Source software and and other things as well so definitely check it out I think there are also different uh other two at least uh

funding mechanisms one of them is hypers the one I already mentioned which is basically an impact token in very simplistic terms and then there is the Retro pgf which is the retr funding uh public retro public retroactive public goods funding sorry uh and that's basically a mechanism where you have some budget again you can maybe raise it from sponsors and then decide retroactively who are the stakeholders that you want to reward in your community so it would be for example us attending e pra and then saying okay we really love the work that the the sun guys were doing or we loved the the Gathering so we want to give split the the the money that we have towards these two groups rather than I don't know the

the gardeners or or something like that so those two mechanisms are super interesting as well but generally uh qf is something very very powerful for Community to fund itself um I think what is interesting with quadratic funding as well is the challenges because again you will see it hyped up a lot but you know it's not without its problems people say that one of the biggest problem is their resource delusion because obviously if you allow anyone to participate maybe in a community you can have hundreds of projects participating but if the matching pool is not high enough every project is going to get let's say $100 which is not really enough to generate more impact in the future so um you need to kind of play around that maybe set some uh benchmarks or Milestone or

restrict participation based on different criteria uh things like that the second problem that everyone always talks about is the kesian beauty contest which is basically our uh bias towards the thing that we think that are popular rather than the things that we like right so if there is a project or someone in your Community that's super popular you know always post pictures it's just like very visible it's likely that they might get more votes in the quadratic funding rounds than people that are doing real impact but maybe are not as visible or as flashy so this is something that's a big issue for quadratic funding as of now but something that should be hopefully eradicated with like proper impact

structures you know like you asking for for great uh the the right um um yeah metric so um yeah I think if you want to check it out uh feel free to to go to gcoin website there's clear fund giveet and also polac that are doing a lot of funding uh public goods funding experiments and really worth exploring um so to sum up these three strategies again there's project incubation we two Partnerships and quadratic funding and I think they connect really well together and they can tell like a really good story for your community because you can have the project incubation or Talent incubation and then project incubation that allows you to really spark

innovation in your community and make sure that there is some kind of value creation then there is uh the second one build Partnerships uh that allows you to really create strong connections within your community and outside of it and really build Bri Bridges so you can maybe match some of the talent that you already captured in your community with Talent outside of your community as as well very powerful and lastly it's quadratic funding and I think that's for more Mator stage uh that allows you to you know really uh find out what matters to your community and give it to tools to found itself and you know reward external uh sponsors or partners that want to engage in it as well so um that's all from me I I want to ask if

there are any questions but uh thank you [Applause] so in refi fi stands for finance um how many projects do you know who are being successful in um you know drawing people to them with the financial incentive or at least projects that can generate enough um Revenue to at least stay like not go into minus with their events and

all the initiatives yeah so obviously we run as an NGO you know we are not a for-profit company I think our goal again is to support the the broader refi space the originative finance space where there are companies that are profitable although it's still a new space and you know you will yeah like everyone can start a refer project like everyone wants to save the world and plant trees and stuff like that but how can you create a business model that helps you sustain it that's the tricky part so I would say that the space hasn't fully figured it out yet because there is a lot of initiatives for example around like onchain carbon credits other form of credits like you know maybe credits for girls education and stuff like that so there are efforts to monetize it better and find ways to

sustain it I think my favorite project in the refi SP space right now is called glow dollar it's basically a stable coin so normally stable coins uh function in a way that they get a pull of funds from from the holders of the token they invested in some different different investment mechanisms like governmental bonds then they use the returns as profit right so what glow dollar does is they do the same they invest in governmental profit uh Bonds in the US that have like 4% interest rate and then they invest these $4 dollars in a good cost of your choice so for example the the main one they started with was the eradication of extreme poverty and it's really cool because just by holding a token you're

doing something good you know and it's it's that's called like programable money and I think projects like these that really Bridge kind of like D5 if refi are more likely to succeed than just like refi because we want to I don't know you know have a beautiful green world I think projects like that have that inher value and people are already holding glow to diversify their their portfolio and stuff so um I think projects like this could could really succeed yeah I hope that answers your question uh does does anybody else have any questions hi I just have a quick question so if someone is not really

familiar with this space and want to get started in brii just learn more about it like what's the best way to sort yeah I think um either join a local note if there is already one and there is a refi uh Dow local note here in Prague but also I would say just dive into books like uh the GRE Pill by K aukee uh listen to the green pill podcast there is also the crypto altruism podcast and refi podcast so I would suggest like get started with those and engage with your local community if you can or even the global refi Community amazing thank you do you see order notes in Colombia or maybe in order country using the

techniques that you just show up like the web to integ like Partnerships or any in in bot colia yeah so we have five refin notes in in Colombia actually and I think in bota they have been partnering uh a lot with NGS helping to stop the valf fires that were happening there last year or in the beginning of this year and it was really cool because for example um they started a give it campaign and you know give it maybe you're going to raise $200 there but again it's a new Avenue for that the NGO would otherwise not have so I think that this this partnership like like bringing the best of both roles is something really really cool thank you okay I think we have uh time for

like one more question um if I may ask uh how big are the numbers like you talking about local communities here and there like what are the numbers and who are the people that are joining what is the age rate or interest or like any social graph that you can share thank you yeah I think there's um it's kind of diverse uh you'll see in refi people there are people that have been working on carbon markets for a few decades there are people that just finished their degrees so I would say it's very diverse generally it's people uh or like a lot of people have entered the the blockchain space and maybe haven't found anything they would really speak to them until they entered like refi because um it can be kind of discouraging for

people that are interested in impact and stuff but all you see is I don't know crypto trading uh things like that so I think people that wanted something more to build with this technology have really found themselves in refi but it's also people again that have been in the traditional impact space for decades and are entering now to kind of see what what they can do with the technology okay that's all the time I would like to thank Teresa for giving her talk and if uh everyone wants to clap or something uh we can thank you [Music]