Upcoming Retro rounds and their design

[timdaub]

@lefterisjp

No more public goods

So I find this deviation appalling. I joined the Optimism badgeholders and became an Optimism citizen because I found the model that there is this protocol that gives parts of its sequence fees to public goods, groundreaking and really promising.

I donated (and later got a bit of OP for it) days of my time for multiple rounds to go through projects and determine their impact and/or eligibility.

I joined to help opensource grow and provide sustainable and recurring funding to opensource public goods.

From conversation with other badgeholders the feelign is similar among many.

Having the foundation unilaterally come in and change that suddenly is insane.

So was it just a meme to pull us all in, have good marketing for the superchain and then when that’s accomplished, we just throw the public goods out?

I’m siding with the sentiment expressed here, but I’m less effected since we can probably still get the “Onchain Builders” round with Kiwi News Protocol. In any case, I want to back up some of Lefteris’ points:

1. Decision wasn’t properly ratified by the OP community

The program was formerly explicitly focused on public goods, and the community hasn’t been given an opportunity to have a say in this switch in the narrative. The switch has been somewhat announced or foreshadowed by the OP foundation, but from what I know, there wasn’t a community temperature check to ratify this change

2. Fighting over what constitutes a public good was actually a productive thing

I personally also thought that the fuzziness of the “public goods” definition and all the controversy it created last round was actually really productive. At Kiwi News, we had dozens of blog posts promoting the idea and we had many people learn something about economics. The public goods part really did a lot of memetic heavy lifting.
I personally built Kiwi News to get as close to the platonic “public goods” ideal, and I did this so intentionally because I liked the idea and because I had faith in getting a kickback from the OP foundation later on. This incentive is now, sadly, gone, and I will also be more inclined to not care for it that much.

2. The public goods framing has actually lead to really interesting outcomes

I actually think that those who dismiss the “public goods” idea as an extension of their criticism that its definition doesn’t work (and they point out “pure” and “impure” public goods) should be ignored here as they are unproductive skeptics.
The point is that some founders have taken the platonic public goods idea, and they’ve attempted to actually innovate on the traditional business stack by taking on new risks and innovating on how to build modern organizations. I believe rotki, EthBerlin, Kiwi News, and others are examples of such organizations that went the unconventional way. They are not doing that out of incompetence but to innovate out of previously discovered impasses. This was a good thing, but this incentive has now been significantly weakened.

I’d welcome the public goods concept back, I think it’s what made the program really compelling and innovative.