“Experiments With Liberal Radicalism: A Crowdfund Matching Mechanism for Public Goods, like Open Source”, Vivek Singh2019-01-16 (, ; backlinks; similar)⁠:

By making an individual donation, you contribute to a public good. This funding is guaranteed to be met by matching funding, widening the reach of your donation. What you do becomes “law.” By donating with one to one matching, you increase the power of any single donation in direct proportion to the size of the donation, making people more likely to feel like their money is having an impact. This is the premise of “Donate $1, [Company X] will match $1” programs. CLR takes this one step further, by emphasizing the importance of unique, individual contributors—even if they each only contribute a small amount. In short, while matching programs have traditionally chosen ‘equal matching’ by default, CLR tries to answer the question: When funding public goods, what is the ‘optimal’ match to maximize individual donations?

There’s a great amount of experimentation in sustaining open source (the Lemonade Stand by Nadia Eghbal is a seminal resource, for those interested). Yet, naturally, it’s hard to solve the problem from the ground up. Public goods are simply hard to fund. If we could find ‘ground up’ solutions, we can shift our open source conversations from ‘sustaining open source’ (all we can ask for, today) to ‘growing open source’ to promote a thriving, healthy internet infrastructure. The CLR mechanism is a concrete proposal for making grassroots donations something much larger. It requires a simple formula to achieve this goal.

  1. Crowdfund individual donations towards open source projects.

  2. ‘Match’ or ‘top-off’ the contributions of individuals from government, grant, or private philanthropy funding

This is something we’re obviously interested in at Gitcoin. It just so happens we’ve launched a crowdfunding platform aiming contributions towards open source projects with Gitcoin Grants. The timing to explore CLR couldn’t be better.

…Gitcoin Grants, given Sybil / resistance via our Github integration, may be one of the best suited parties to help implement “Liberal Radicalism” ideas in a real and constructive way, within open source communities. These experiments fit quite well with what we’re doing both at Gitcoin Labs and Gitcoin Grants. We plan to carry on with CLR experiments. Please feel join our public Discourse around the topic and share with anyone who you think might be interested in contributing to the discussion. We don’t expect Liberal Radicalism to be a panacea, but are excited to engage in conversation and experimentation along the way. We look forward to continued conversation with the RadicalxChange community as we continue our research into structural support for a more resilient, open internet.