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It’s a one-hour portrait of the people behind some of the App Store’s more popular apps. Watching it, I couldn’t help but compare them to the stories of open source developers, who make the tools that everybody uses to build software today.

Similar challenges

The challenges discussed were quite similar: 1) low revenue despite high user adoption, 2) entitled users demanding free work, and 3) belief that platforms could improve the situation via better policies.

“I had amazing success in the App Store. I’ve had hundreds of thousands of customers. And even with that, it was impossible to sustain the business.”

While app developers and open source developers live in different worlds and serve different audiences, there were so many parallels between the challenges described, that I wondered whether there’s a broader story that isn’t being discussed. Namely, the tense relationship between developers who make tools, and the platforms that distribute their work.

Apple’s App Store is to app developers what GitHub is to open source developers. The Developers Union reminded me instantly of Dear GitHub a few years ago, not only in the fact that it’s a group of developers speaking up, but in the approach and nature of their demands.

Both were open letters to Apple and to GitHub, suggesting that they don’t have any other way of reaching the company (Dear GitHub: “We have no visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is working on them”). Both had an unusually specific list of asks (ex. app developers want free trial options, open source developers wanted issue templates).

There is something sort of depressing about the specificity of these demands. Taken together with the open letter format, it suggests to me that these actions are a last resort: these platforms don’t have existing deep relationships with their power users, nor have they taken time to understand them.

In a 2013 analysis of Apple’s App Store, Ben Thompson noted (at least at the time) that this is partly due to developers lacking an advocate on Apple’s leadership team. GitHub, as well, lacks a developer relations team or any dedicated leadership focused on its open source developers.

Platform responsibility

Another recurring topic between open source and app developers is the extent to which platforms are responsible for creating the undesirable incentives and business models we see today. As one developer put it:

“You could make the excuse that it’s a free market and it’s just becoming what it will, but it’s not actually a free market. It’s Apple’s App Store, and there seems to be a loss there.”

According to the app developers interviewed, the most lucrative form of App Store monetization today are in-app purchases, which is partly due to not having the price tiers that app developers need (like free trials). This means that, in one developer’s words, “scammy game makers” thrive off of it and are able to succeed, while “developers who actually respect humanity” can’t. Ben Thompson’s aforementioned analysis supports this thesis, noting that productivity apps, for example, make money just fine elsewhere…via trials, paid updates, and built-in subscriptions, none of which the App Store supports.

Similarly, while open source tools are difficult to monetize more generally, the ability to experiment with funding models (such as advertising, crowdfunding, and subscriptions) is constrained by GitHub’s policies and product, much like a tenant is constrained by their ability to modify an apartment that they’ve rented. Open source projects on GitHub represent billions of dollars in value creation, but none of that is captured on GitHub. (If you don’t believe me, consider that at minimum, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both developed on GitHub.)

Poor pricing models also mean that users don’t adequately value the product, which leads to the entitlement observed by both app and open source developers. For the former, it’s reviewers complaining about paying 99 cents for an app, and for the latter, it’s developers opening issues and demanding they get fixed quickly.

However, even if platforms are responsible for the economic conditions we see today, it’s unclear whether we should expect them to change their policies. More recently, Ben Thompson described platforms as “when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it.” In his view, many “platforms” are actually aggregators: intermediaries who capture economic value for themselves. His previous analysis digs into the same line of thinking, including a speculation that Apple can’t let any of its apps become bigger than Apple itself, because apps exist solely to drive sales of hardware. As evidence, he cites Apple’s dependence on Microsoft Office and Adobe for its sales historically, and how “humiliating” it must have been.

If that’s the case, perhaps it’s naive to assume that platforms will ever act in their users’ best interests. Those hoping for reform might be better served by regulation (make it harder for distributors to unilaterally capture value) or revolution (create entirely new forms of distribution) to align developer and consumer incentives.

Cultural differences

Finally, it’s worth briefly touching on the ways in which app developers and open source developers are different, culturally speaking.

Firstly, selling an app is not like selling code, because most apps in the App Store are not open source. It’s harder to productize open source code, because the license terms are so permissive.

That being said, I do wonder whether there’s anything to be learned from how apps monetize. For example, an open source developer could make their code freely available for a one-time fee. (Yes, this would make it technically-not-open-source, but I like experiments more than I like definitions. Edit for clarity: I am referring to charging existing users for access to source code, which violates OSD section 2. Not selling open source software, which is permitted.) Even if it were hard to prevent users from sharing the code after purchase, I imagine many would be happy to pay — much like paying for a book or article that you could then theoretically share around.

Secondly, the endgame for successful app developers vs. open source developers are different. Successful open source developers get “acquihired” by a company who values their reputation and skills, which has the perverse effect of making them less noisy about how to make a living off of open source. Oftentimes, they slow or stop working on the projects that made them popular in the first place.

By contrast, because apps have some semblance of a business model, being a successful app developer seems to look more like running an independent business. Many of the app developers interviewed took pride in choosing not to work for a big company. (In one memorable case, the developers behind Panic got an email from Steve Jobs, who met with them and suggested they work for Apple, which they turned down.)

While many open source developers also remain independent, they usually don’t make money off open source directly. A contractor lifestyle merely gives them the freedom to work on open source on their off-days. But as “small business owners”, app developers have no choice but to advocate, and arguably have more of a stake in improving their situation in the long run.

Developers as toolmakers

Despite these differences, I’d consider both groups to be under the umbrella of toolmakers: people who make software that enables others to do more. I hadn’t previously thought of apps this way, because apps tend to reach consumers, whereas open source tools are made for developers. But consider a productivity, drawing, or a messaging app, and they don’t seem much different than a software library or framework after all.

These tools are indispensable to our everyday lives, because they shape what we want and how we get it. As Jake Lodwick put it: “People tend to become the software they use”. Sure, some toolmakers turn into multi-billion dollar companies. But a good tool can come from anywhere. (In this way, we’re still a delightfully primitive society, connected at internet scale: someone turns a rock into a hammer, then hands it to a friend. Someone writes a better library, then publishes it for anyone to use.)

Toolmakers play a critical role in accelerating human progress, and their work ought to be recognized and celebrated. App and open source developers aren’t exactly the same, but given the similarity of their motivations, I wonder if they’d benefit from working together more closely and learning from each others’ approaches.

— —

(N.B.: I know basically nothing about app developers outside of watching this documentary, so consider this more of a reflection than a definitive statement. I’d love to hear how your experiences align to what I’ve described above!)

Elinor Ostrom’s work deals with common pool resource (CPR) management, for which she won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. She argues that current game theory doesn’t explain why some commons are, in fact, sustainably managed.

Ostrom outlines a few theories that we typically use to explain why common resource allocation will fail without intervention:

• Prisoner’s dilemma: A game where two individuals do not cooperate, even though they rationally ought to
• Tragedy of the commons: Individuals in the commons act according to their personal interest, thus depleting the resource
• Free-rider problem: Individuals enjoy a benefit without contributing back, because there is no cost associated with doing so

The underlying assumption is that without external intervention, individuals will act selfishly, without regard for collective interests.

Typically, this makes the case for two types of intervention: the “market” or the “state”. For example, to address climate change, we’ve tried carbon emissions trading (market) and international negotiations like the Kyoto Protocol (state).

However, Ostrom noticed there are many situations where common resources are allocated efficiently, without intervention from the market or state. She explores, through a series of case studies, why this occurred, and under what conditions we could recreate these situations.

Note that Ostrom focuses on CPRs, which are non-excludable and rivalrous resources (like fisheries, forests, or farmland). CPRs can be overused and depleted, unlike the consumption of public goods (like music, code, or content). However, I think the production of digital public goods often has rivalrous properties. Regardless, this distinction is irrelevant to why I found her work so useful.

I won’t list every condition she came up with, but a few that stuck out to me:

• Drawing a circle around your community: Defining the boundaries of the commons and closing it to “outsiders”
• Localization: One policy does not fit all. Rules must be adapted to that particular community
• Monitoring and enforcement: There is some level of accountability to make sure that rules are followed and decisions are understood

My big takeaway from the patterns Ostrom identified is that sustainably managing the commons requires a high degree of context among participants. Most failure outcomes can be traced back to context collapse. This is true whether you’re an open source project or someone with a large Twitter following.

Ostrom paints an eerily accurate picture of the problems we see today:

…no one communicates, everyone acts independently, no attention is paid to the effects of one’s actions, and the costs of trying to change the structure of the situation are high

Whereas in the sustainable, “smaller-scale” CPRs she looked at,

…individuals repeatedly communicate and interact with one another…[When individuals] have developed shared norms and patterns of reciprocity, they possess social capital with which they can build institutional arrangements for resolving CPR dilemmas.

Ostrom believes that given the right conditions, actors can work together to sustainably manage the commons. That means not leaning on government, foundations, or businesses to solve the problem, but rather recognizing (and trusting!) the community’s ability to regulate itself, so long as individuals have high mutual trust and a low discount rate (i.e., long-term interest in the community). Managing at scale doesn’t mean stuffing more and more people into the same community, but acknowledging boundaries and working together to govern at multiple levels. (Ostrom calls this a “polycentric” approach.)

An important caveat to Ostrom’s work is that she’s not replacing existing game theory, but simply adding to the list of possible outcomes: one in which there is a successful resolution without external intervention. In the end, Ostrom refuses to create a model based on the conditions she identified, insisting only upon a “framework”, because she believes every situation is different and highly localized to the actors involved, and that in itself is one of her main points.

That approach deeply resonates when I consider what it looks like to sustainably manage open source infrastructure. I’ve felt overwhelmed by the differences between communities; it feels daunting to hope for anything that could singlehandedly address it all. Ostrom’s work gives me hope that maybe that’s the point, and rather than trying to “fix” it, perhaps the goal is to understand and catalog these behavioral differences, so that commonalities emerge between them.

Ultimately, however, the power to fix it lies in developers’ hands, and when viewed through that lens, it’s easier to see which solutions are more or less likely to succeed. (Raising money to pay for a major contributor’s work is a high-context, self-organized solution. Paying out bounties to strangers is a low-context solution.)

Finally, although Ostrom was recognized and respected in her lifetime, her theories never made it into the mainstream, whereas more fatalistic options, like prisoner’s dilemma and tragedy of the commons, persist. Why is that the case?

I have two guesses. Firstly, nobody wants to be told the answer is complicated, whereas the other models are simple, even if they’re pessimistic and reductive.

But secondly, maybe her time hadn’t yet come. We’re entering a period where people are distrustful of institutions, where decentralization is the rally-cry. Maybe now is the time to cast aside the market and the state as our saviors, and instead consider an alternative: one that recognizes the ability of people to organize and design solutions for themselves.

If you’ve ever sat through a dinner like that, you know how things usually end: someone throws their napkin on the table and storms off. Everybody nibbles on their casserole in silence.

Online, however, it’s a lot harder to leave. Instead we’re stuck at the table, forced to make conversation with our racist uncle.

The past few years marked an explosion of outrage, and we’ve only just begun to make sense of the carnage. Many have eagerly put forth their theories about why we’re all so angry. Maybe outrage is caused by tribalism, or a lack of context, or information overload, or companies riling us up for advertising clicks.

Here’s another one: maybe outrage is dissent without an outlet, a byproduct of platform lock-in with nowhere to hide and nowhere else to go.

Exit as an alternative to voice

In the 1970s, Albert Hirschman proposed the following economic theory: faced with deteriorating quality of goods, consumers have two choices: exit (leave our environment) or voice (stay and advocate for change).

Our environment, in this case, are the platforms we use to communicate with one another, like Twitter or Facebook. We can’t exit those environments, despite horrors like violent livestreams on Facebook, rape threats on Twitter, and disturbing children’s videos on YouTube, because these platforms have worked so hard to make sure that we don’t. Acording to Hirschman, when people can’t exit, they resort to voice, which looks a lot like outrage.

Right now, I see a lot of people advocating for voice. Users are frustrated because they don’t have a say in the governance of their platforms. We see this play out clearly in the case of Twitter’s efforts to combat spam and abuse.

Government is getting involved. Europe has long been ahead of the game on data protection and privacy laws, but in the past year, even U.S. lawmakers are taking menacing steps towards the so-called “Frightful Five”.

And platforms are responding. In mid-2016, Mark Zuckerberg famously scoffed at the idea that Facebook played any role in the U.S. presidential election. Several months later, Facebook, perhaps realizing that user loyalty was at stake, issued a swift turnaround to tackle misinformation, including allowing users to vote on news they find valuable.

Everyone is trying to stay together and make things work. But in an odd way, regulation implicitly strengthens our ties to these platforms. By investing in voice, we’re doubling down on a bad relationship instead of exploring alternatives.

Off-platform exits

What does it mean to exit? Exiting, in its most literal sense, is migration: leaving a platform in search of another digital land to call home. (In software development, this is forking.)

Taking a page from Rousseau’s Social Contract, there are two kinds of sovereignty. Platforms have legal sovereignty: they’re the watering holes we’ve decided to converge on. We’ve entered a tacit social contract with these platforms, but our true, natural sovereignty lies in the network itself (in other words: us).

Twitter has no inherent value, except that it’s where we agree to gather, find, and talk to each other. Uber has no inherent value, except that it’s where we agree to find, vet, and ride with each other.

Platforms have a responsibility to allow users to leave. Software isn’t the limiting factor here, but data. People should be allowed to export their data, and that data should be treated as a public good, managed by a neutral entity. Estonia, for example, has taken a crack at this.

These ideas are usually met with much scoffing and resistance, because it would require platforms to give up their biggest financial asset. While being able to export one’s data seems important, I imagine it will take government-level regulation, a catastrophe (just kidding), or building an entirely new data set to make it happen.

Without owning the data layer, network effects make it difficult for us to simply go off and start a new place to gather. Just ask Diaspora, App.net, or Ello. And perhaps that’s why we’re so focused on voice right now: because we see the graveyard littered with bones of those who tried to leave.

But while the old “let’s start a new Facebook!” rally-cry rings a bit hollow, it doesn’t mean that in-fighting is our only alternative. If the goal is to diffuse outrage, there are also on-platform exit options.

On-platform exits

Returning to the family dinner analogy, another possibility is making it easy for people to “exit” the conversation, while still remaining on the platform. Let the cousins wander off to the living room to grumble among themselves, even if nobody leaves the house. (In software development, this makes me think of sharding: breaking up data into smaller chunks to make it more manageable.)

Facebook isn’t a community. It’s a landowner: the wide plains and open skies to which communities flock. Your “community” is made up of the people you’re friends with, whose updates you see, and whom you interact with.

In that sense, platforms have a responsibility to let people organize themselves horizontally, on the same plot of land, until they find a configuration that’s sustainable. This is also how Mastodon designed their network, using a federated model. If platforms treat “exit” as a feature rather than a bug, they can retain their users by offering spaces for smaller, context-rich interactions.

We’re already seeing people do this:

• More conversation and activity now takes place in private messengers (FB Messenger, Whatsapp, etc)
• Blocking and muting tools are increasingly popular and effective (e.g. on Twitter), because they let you create the community you want to see
• Groups (ex. subreddits) are ways for people to break up their communities. Facebook has made Groups one of its top priorities as a form of “very meaningful” interaction
• Stories are becoming a preferred way to share content over newsfeeds — not, I suspect, because it’s a “better format” but because it feels more private and curated

Maybe the path to scaling social interactions is not starting over elsewhere, but making it easy to break up big communities into smaller ones.

This puts a hopeful, if somewhat dystopian, spin on the “let’s start a new Facebook” idea. If Facebook’s getting you down, just start a new one…but you’ll probably still do it on Facebook.

Challenges with federated communities

If we embrace the idea of “sharding” communities when they get too large, what are some potential challenges?

Influencers, by virtue of their audience and often polarizing viewpoints, are disproportionately affected by today’s mob mentality. That means more of the interesting conversations are moving to private messaging.

If that trend continues, I wonder if we’ll end up in “knowledge ghettos”, where influencers no longer contribute their best knowledge to the public sphere.

The analogy here would be a poorly-funded public school, where all the rich parents in the area send their kids to the nice private school, instead of investing in their local public option. If social media is a public space, history tells us that public spaces tend to become under-resourced, partly because the elite can afford better options.

I doubt that influencers would disappear entirely. After all, they still need their audience. Instead, the public would still benefit from their knowledge (ex. writing, podcasts), but it’d be more of a one-to-many relationship. There could also be a two-way mirror relationship, where influencers read whatever non-influencers publish, but you can’t see their reactions unless they choose to engage privately. This would take us back to the pre-internet days of communication, where most people are consumers, rather than co-creators, of high-value content.

Whatever the case, it’s in a platform’s best interest to retain influencers, because they bring their audiences and help maintain the quality of public conversation.

Embracing the filter bubble

One theory behind why social media isn’t fun anymore goes like this:

The internet was fun in its early days because there weren’t that many people using it. Now that everybody is online, it’s just as tedious as the real world.

We’re currently in the process of bringing our physical world online, and that transition is painful. We can see fascists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia. We can see activists rallying in North Carolina. Everyone is trapped at the party, sullenly sipping beer in the corner, eyeing the crowd and thinking “Who invited those people?”

In the halcyon tech days of 2010, Eli Pariser warned us of the dangers of the “filter bubble”. Given our scale today, maybe bubbles aren’t such a bad thing. Maybe they’re just realistic. If so, letting people break off into their own conversations, instead of trying to keep them in the same place, is the world we should design for.

Platforms have to choose whether to provide exit or voice, but as the de facto governments of the digital world, they also can’t sit on the fence and do neither. To do nothing is autocracy.

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But when a developer produces code of their own choosing, they quickly find that while their code-writing skills have market value, their output (the code they write) has none.

Ben Lesh 🧢🏋️‍♂️💻🎨 on Twitter

Open Source is such a strange thing. The open source work I do is clearly the most impactful work I do, but no one wants to pay me to work on it. Yet I'm asked to speak about it, and the work I'm actually *paid* to do no one really wants to hear about.

Given parallel conversations these days about open source, funding protocols, and paying creators, I thought it’d be fun to break down some of the behavioral quirks that make developer markets so challenging (yet fascinating!) to work with.

A rough glance at the history of software suggests there are three ways that developers make money:

1) Sell output (code) — popular in the 1980s/early 1990s
2) Sell skills (time) — popular in the late 1990s-today
3) Sell access (reputation) — popular in the future (?)

In the early days, it was assumed developers could make money by selling software itself. As with other digital goods, this proved to be difficult. As the software industry grew, however, developers found an easy landing in the job market, selling their time to employers. In the future, as we move towards a reputation-based economy, I’m guessing that developers will find ways to make money based on who they are, rather than what they produce.

Selling code

At first glance, developers look like the perfect customers. They have a lot of money to spend (both theirs and their employers’), they use a lot of tools in their work, and they recommend new ones to each other all the time.

Yet despite these characteristics, software is notoriously hard to monetize, for two reasons: 1) the tendency of code to be shared freely, and 2) developers’ desire and ability to create alternatives.

Like other digital goods, code has zero marginal cost, meaning that once it’s been created, it can be replicated and consumed for free. Initially, developers used licenses to put up artificial barriers around consumption: a relic from our physical world. But as with music, journalism, or any other kind of digital content, this approach hasn’t been very successful. Information wants to be freely shared, despite our best efforts to make it behave otherwise.

The other option is to charge for something that developers don’t want to deal with. This is challenging, because developers are both the creators and consumers of their own products, which makes selling to developers a bit like selling ice to an Eskimo.

Let’s say I need to buy a couch. If I don’t like any of the options I find, unless I know how to make my own furniture, I’m going to shrug my shoulders and buy one.

But if I’m a developer who can’t find any library I particularly like, I might decide to write my own version (and even enjoy it!). With the vast amount of code that’s publicly available today, it’s easy enough for me to make a copy (fork) and try my hand. And if I’m successful, it’s also likely I’ll share my code with the rest of the world, whether to show off what I’ve done, or because I get joy out of someone else using my solution.

However, this is mostly true for code that developers want to tinker with. The more “not-fun” the code is, the less likely there are to be alternatives.

So if you sell something that developers really don’t want to deal with, it’s more likely you can charge for it. For example, hosting, security, reliability, support, and “money code” are popular areas where software makes money. In effect, it’s charging for convenience, rather than the code itself.

But not all (I’d venture to say “most”) code has this advantage, and I imagine those opportunities are shrinking, not growing, over time, as we automate away more and more of the hard bits.

Selling time

If developers can’t sell their code, they can sell their skills (measured as time), whether by freelancing or joining a company full-time.

Employment and reputation are at odds with each other, however, because getting hired means writing code that your employer wants you to write, rather than your own. Some companies address this problem with 20% time, hack weeks, or other flexible arrangements (it’s difficult to think of any other job market that enjoys these benefits!), but in the end, it’s a perk, not a core part of the job.

Selling time doesn’t allow a developer to make money producing their own code. It merely funds their lifestyle so they can write other code in their spare time.

Freelancing is no better. Your hours and choice of projects might be more flexible, but you’re still paid to produce something for a client rather than for yourself.

There’s another problem with selling time. If code is your output, and code is basically knowledge, then over time, we don’t need to write as much code as we used to. A lot of code that gets written is already interchangeable between developers, and increasingly machines. In the long run, it’s possible that we won’t need to hire developers to do some of this work as often, or at all.

If that sounds ridiculous, consider how much the cost of launching a software product has dropped today, compared to 10 or 15 years ago. It’s not just that infrastructure costs have gotten cheaper, but that fewer developers are needed to perform the same tasks. (Edit: Dan Luu compares developer salaries to that of lawyers, noting that the latter bifurcated over time — in part because “lawyers have gotten hit hard by automation”, and speculates on future developer earnings.)

Selling access

So what’s a developer to do?

Firstly, the above options will probably always work for some developers, some of the time. Someone will always make money off of selling software, or making it more convenient, or working for a company, or freelancing. I don’t mean to suggest that any of these options will ever go away completely.

But for developers writing code in the public domain, every option above is a workaround, not a solution. At the same time, the perceived value of this public code seems to be rising, as more and more companies rely on it. So it seems inevitable that new opportunities will arise.

Much of the chatter is centered around funding projects themselves, but I wonder whether we’re looking at the wrong side of the horse. Maybe it’s not the projects, but the people behind the projects, that carry the most value.

So long as we focus on code, we’ll keep coming back to the problem of substitutes. Code has many substitutes. Getting paid to write code has many substitutes (whether human or machine). But a developer’s reputation has fewer substitutes.

By reputation, I mean something you can provide that nobody else can. A few examples I can think of:

• Charge for prioritization: If you manage an open source project that I use, then I might pay you to respond to my bug report, my email, or to have 1:1 office hours with you. I think developers shy away from this because it seems wrong somehow, but the definition of open source says nothing about how it gets produced, only how it is distributed.
• Charge for knowledge: Much like a musician appearing in concert 😉 I’ve seen some open source developers host workshops (ex. Workshop.me) or teach online courses (ex. Egghead.io).
• Charge for brand: Patreon is an obvious example. Also, some companies retain employees that they consider beneficial for their ties to certain open source communities. I wonder whether this might become more popular over time: almost more like a brand sponsorship than employment. A similar example might be the string of targeted hires that Microsoft recently made, which undoubtedly boosts their brand.

These examples might look trivial today, but what sets them apart from the other options is that the funding engine is the developer’s reputation, not the code they write.

In the early 1990s, it seemed inconceivable that people wouldn’t pay for software. Today, it might seem inconceivable that developers might eventually not sell their time. Given that the world at large is tilting towards the individual, I’m curious to see how those trends impact developers, and whether they might find new ways to capture value in the market.

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Their debate centers around the value of “on-chain” governance (in other words: decisions enforced by protocol) and the sovereignty of people versus code.

When I read Fred’s post, however, I was struck by a different observation: that despite a supposed “Cambrian explosion” of new governance models, every idea that’s referenced utilizes the concept of voting.

If we’re coming up with wild ideas for social coordination, voting seems like an awfully familiar solution. Let’s start with a blank sheet of paper…

What does a governance system look like that doesn’t require voting at all?

I started to sketch out some ideas, which I’ll outline in the remainder of this post.

Why do we even vote?

Voting, in its modern form, is only as old as the Enlightenment, which bubbled up in the late 1700s and gave birth to the liberal democracy, with the French and American Revolutions as its poster children.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the dominant form of Western government was monarchy, where governing power was inherited or assumed by a small group of elite, who believed that most citizens couldn’t be trusted to make such decisions.

Under monarchy, citizens were largely uninterested in government affairs. The king was a distant authority who collected taxes every once in awhile. Why should they care when they didn’t have any input?

In the new era of “government for the people, by the people”, voting was introduced to give people an official stake in government, thus incentivizing them to participate.

Compared to what we had before, voting is obviously an improvement. But the problems that liberal democracy tried to solve for in the 1700s (apathy, lack of decisionmaking power) are different from the emerging social problems we need to address today.

What’s wrong with voting?

Although voting seems like an intuitive concept, there are a few major flaws that seem to be getting worse over time.

Voting is never truly representative

We assume voting is fair because it vaguely reflects some total population that we are trying to represent. It’s impossible to exactly pin down what “representative” means. (Similar demographics, interests, incomes, ideologies? All of the above?) But to use an extreme example, if the only people voting in the U.S. presidential election were residents of Biloxi, Mississippi, that would not be considered representative.

Even today, the analog gap between voters and “true” population is problematic. It’s ruthlessly exploited through tactics like gerrymandering, voter registration to encourage turnout, and voter ID laws to suppress it.

But the gap is even worse in a decentralized community, where total population is unknown and may never reveal themselves. An open source project doesn’t know who downloads their code, and they have no way of contacting them. ISIS, with its vision of an Islamic state, is more of a movement than a centralized organization.

Given this state of affairs, how do we know whom to represent, whom to protect, and whose interests are being served? Under these conditions, the concept of “representative voting” is likely impossible.

Voting is a competitive game

Voting is a zero-sum game, meaning that whomever wins does so at the expense of someone else. As a result, voting promotes competition, not cooperation. Players might coordinate as a means of gaining an edge (“if you vote for X this time, I’ll give you Y next time”), but ultimately, “winning” the vote means beating someone else.

Under competitive circumstances, we form groups — whether informal alliances or political parties — and we fight each other viciously for a win.

In the United States, the framers tried to address this problem with checks and balances. But they also made a fatal mistake. They didn’t anticipate the formation of political parties, other than to actively discourage them. So although the United States has checks and balances against the three branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — there are no checks on the power of a single, well-coordinated faction spanning across branches.

To reduce competition, some governments have experimented with runoff voting and similar approaches, but they have yet to take off, probably because they are too complicated (more on that later).

Voting still works in limited contexts

“Voting is a last resort. A healthy community should rarely need to vote.” — Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian W. Fitzpatrick

Voting isn’t entirely useless. It can be helpful in limited matters when the total population is small, known, and relatively homogenous — which, funnily enough, is how things looked when liberal democracy made its debut.

In 1800, there were 5.3 million Americans. When you take out slaves, women, and children, you’re left with ~1 million eligible voters, all of whom were free, male, and white. Those are the conditions under which the United States launched its grand experiment.

Hence the old complaint of, e.g. “Belgium has a great healthcare system, why doesn’t the United States?” It’s a lot easier to coordinate Belgium than the United States, or moreover a global, decentralized internet population.

Voting can also serve as a tiebreaker when consensus cannot otherwise be reached. But as a permanent fixture of government, people are incentivized to exploit it.

The veneer of objectivity

Voting is alluring for the same reason that on-chain governance is alluring. If a complete lack of governance leads to the “tyranny of structurelessness”, over-engineered systems create a “veneer of objectivity” that lets us put blind faith into something greater than ourselves — and in doing so, absolve ourselves of the very real, hard work of disagreeing and compromising with our fellow humans.

If humans are good at one thing, it is circumvention. It seems paradoxical to call decentralization “revolutionary” while also preaching government by automation. If so, what a disappointing revolution! If we ever get to the point where we blindly accept what a bunch of code tells us to do, machines will have won and humanity, in all its creative chaos, will sink into decline.

It’s undeniable, however, that our current system poses a number of problems, so if nothing else, we should ask ourselves what’s working and what isn’t, much like our 18th-century Enlightenment counterparts.

So. We have our current system, and we’ve identified some emerging problems that we need to solve for. What does that look like?

Designing for cooperation, not competition

If you’re an avid board gamer, you’ve probably come across a cooperative game or two, like Pandemic or Forbidden Island. In a cooperative game, you work with, rather than compete against, your fellow players to achieve a shared outcome. (In game theory, this is akin to a stag hunt.)

A few real-life examples of cooperative games:

• Global warming: Figure out how to cool down the planet, or everybody dies. (It’s telling that the only “challenge” in this game comes from people who deny — i.e. defect from — the game entirely.)
• Actual nuclear warfare is an outcome that everybody would like to avoid (although nuclear proliferation itself is a competitive game)
• Government shutdown: In 2013, the U.S. government shut down for two weeks because nobody could agree on the budget. To restore operations, legislators had to work together.

Here are a few interesting features I’ve noticed about cooperative games:

Default mode is failure

Players are incentivized to work together because they’re trying to avoid a failed outcome. For example, in Pandemic, you’re trying to stop a disease outbreak, and in Forbidden Island, you’re trying to escape a sinking island.

Unlike voting or other competitive games, everyone agrees that the default outcome is bad, so they’re motivated to figure out how to escape their terrible fate. If one person loses, everybody loses.

Bias is towards action

A cooperative game’s incentive is never “Figure out how to do X”. That outcome is too hard, and when things are hard, people don’t want to do them, and our lazy reptilian brains invent ways to get around it (because again, humans are great at circumvention!).

By specifying the outcome beforehand— “Bad thing X will happen unless you change it”, and making it undesirable, we have no choice but to take action or lose the game.

Timeline is known

Players must feel a sense of urgency when working together to solve the problem. As a counterexample: why don’t more people care about climate change? Because nobody really knows when disaster is going to strike. Without knowing if it’s a 10-year or 1,000-year problem, people are reluctant to take action.

Cooperative governance in modern times

I’d love to see more cooperative mechanics introduced into our governance models, because I think they’re uniquely suited to our modern social challenges.

The first wave of open source communities (ex. Debian, Linux, and Apache) pioneered the use of voting systems. But among modern open source communities like Node.js and Rust, we’re seeing a shift towards cooperative governance.

Some projects use lazy consensus, where consensus is assumed to be the default state (i.e. “default to yes”). The underlying theory is that most proposals are not interesting enough to discuss. But if anyone does object, a consensus seeking process begins.

The goal of consensus seeking is to discuss concerns until no blockers remain, without coming to a vote. A vote is considered the “failure” outcome. Participants voice their concerns and listen to each other, but try to avoid blocking (or stalemating) the proposed course of action. When no blockers remain, stakeholders are said to have reached consensus.

Under consensus seeking, a proposal theoretically might have won 10–2, but if those 10 felt weakly about their support, and those 2 feel strongly opposed, the minority could still win.

Here are a few reasons why cooperative games work with, not against, today’s emerging social norms:

A veto is expensive

Under voting, it’s cheap to veto (i.e. vote against something), which has led to an anti-pattern of outrage today. Not only is it cheap to disagree, but you’re often rewarded for it (in the form of attention and/or reputation).

Cooperative mechanics flip this around, so it’s cheap to do nothing and expensive to raise an objection. That means people reserve their objections for stuff they really care about. If you object too often, other people are likely to start discounting your opinion.

You can focus on what you care about

When voting, the expectation is that everyone ought to participate. Even abstaining is a conscious decision. But in a cooperative game, you can participate as much or as little as you’d like.

It’s no secret that we’re drowning in information. As Albert Wenger suggests, today’s challenge is not finding time to actually read everything, but rather deciding where to spend your limited attention.

It’s impossible to maintain deep knowledge of every political topic of importance. Cooperative governance gives us permission to be curators, focusing on just our areas of passion and expertise.

Reputation becomes powerful

Reputation is quickly becoming more important than money. (Or, rather: perhaps money was just a historic proxy for reputation.) Cooperative games leverage the power of reputation really well, because you need reputation to capture attention. And whomever captures enough attention, gains influence.

While this may sound bleak at first, when compared to wealth, reputation strikes me as a more democratic alternative. Black Lives Matter started as a hashtag. The Women’s March started on Facebook. For all that was terrible about the U.S. presidential election, Trump broke the mold of how people become president, simply with a powerful enough megaphone.

Votes can be manipulated by propaganda and special interests. (Consider the ethics of a “voter registration drive” sponsored by a partisan group.) Reputation takes time to build, but it belongs to you.

Building cooperation into the system

I won’t go into this too much, but it’d be fun to consider how to actually build these mechanics into a system. Cooperative governance offers an elegant compromise between on- and off-chain governance: you have a failure outcome that’s enforced and “real”, but the process of consensus remains firmly in the hands of people.

Here are a few half-baked ideas for how we might implement cooperation mechanics:

• Enforced deadlines for RFCs: For any new proposal, you could specify that it will be merged after X period, in whatever state it’s in.
• Auto-renewals for existing policies: This, plus lazy consensus, could be particularly interesting for social welfare programs. Consider the benefit of opt-out vs. opt-in organ donor programs, or automatic enrollment for 401(k) retirement plans.
• Expiration dates for existing policies: This policy will expire at X date, so people are incentivized to figure out what comes after.
• Fail-deadlies: Similar to a dead man’s switch: if X changes, it will cause incredibly horrible thing Y to happen. (Remember that button they had to keep pushing on Lost? Kinda like that.)

Problems with cooperative games

Finally, no governance system is perfect, because humans are — again! — sneaky little buggers, and we like to find ways to break things. What problems might we anticipate?

• Lack of representativeness: Some aren’t able to advocate for themselves directly (ex. children or people with severe mental disabilities)
• Hijack the signaling: Media platforms, for example, could influence popular opinion on a topic by promoting or suppressing different types of content.
• Oligarchy, cults of the individual: If you’re a prominent person with a strong reputation on a given topic, you’ll want to protect your influence. Also, others who want to participate but don’t yet have a reputation become overly reliant on your voice.
• Defect from the game: People who don’t like the way things are going, and don’t feel they can influence it, will go somewhere else. So cooperative mechanics could cause more forking and fragmentation, not less. (I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing.)

We’re in the era of the stag hunt

Finally, please note: these are just ideas. We can’t, and shouldn’t, drag-and-drop new systems onto people without their buy-in. And it won’t be easy to transition from competitive to cooperative governance, because people will want to preserve their existing interests.

Still, if you’re starting from scratch, I hope this post provides some inspiration. Voting wasn’t designed for scale, and it’s not going to carry us through the next era of governance.

We need to encourage people to work together: not by making things harder, but with equally simple alternatives. We need to design a system that properly acknowledges reputation as the powerful asset it’s become. And we need a system that doesn’t overwhelm our attention, but rather respects our desire to focus.

And we need to do it all before society implodes. (In fact: the shared sense of doom and gloom that we’re feeling these days points to a great opportunity for a cooperative game!)

I write about money, governance, and the internet. Get future posts by email by subscribing here.

When the harassment stories about venture capitalists started coming out, I sort of rolled my eyes. Yes, of course, we all go through these things. Some of us just don’t talk about it.

There was an odd level to which I prided myself on NOT talking about the things that I’ve experienced. On keeping my mouth shut and being professional in the face of the many unprofessional things that have happened.

When the VC stories came out, a friend asked over dinner whether I’d had similar experiences in tech. I said yes, and I described several. I refused to provide identifying details. After all, it was so long ago.

A month or so later, another incident happened, this time in my current field of work. The next evening, I met up with the same friend, who asked how I was doing, and I mentioned that I was a bit rattled due to something that had happened the day before. He asked me to elaborate. I would not. I refused to even share the details of what had happened.

I realized that I felt embarrassed about it. I worried that perhaps I had caused it somehow, and if I told him the details, he might agree. I was worried that *I* might appear to be the crazy one.

I did cautiously relay that thought aloud: “I do start to wonder…is it me?”, and as I did, I felt fear seize my heart. I fully expected him to say yes. Instead, his face softened and he told me that I sounded like every other victim in this situation who blames themselves instead of the other person.

My first thought was, “But I’m not a victim”. And my second thought was that he was right.

When the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I read two accounts of the situation and had two very different reactions.

The first was from the New York Times. A fairly straightforward piece that cast Harvey as a perpetrator and listed, rather dispassionately, the types of things he had done to women. It felt like a story we all knew, and as a result, I felt sort of unimpressed, the same way I’d felt when I read the story about VCs harassing women.

The second piece I read was Ronan Farrow’s, published in The New Yorker. Ronan had spent hours interviewing thirteen of the women that Harvey assaulted, and his retelling mirrored all the complexities that come with it.

These stories weren’t easy. They didn’t paint Harvey as an unequivocal demon, calling for bloodthirsty retribution. Indeed, one woman noted that she respected Harvey as an artist. Several maintained a relationship with Harvey afterwards, including sexual relations. Others wondered if it was their fault for not stopping him. Many spoke of a fear of retaliation if they did anything. And one woman said she left the entertainment industry as a result.

Whenever I see media reporting on sexual misconduct, I tend to roll my eyes. I cannot convey the level of internal fuckery that I feel over my own reaction, despite having been in these women’s shoes.

As more and more of these stories come out, I’ve tried to understand why I respond this way. And when I read Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker piece, I finally realized why.

The binary media portrayal is written by people looking for a story, one that requires flattening its characters into a paper battle of good vs. evil. When I read them, I feel a level of disgust for their reductiveness, and the uncontrollable wildfire of public outrage that tends to come along. The public denouncement and shaming of the men. The declarations of “we have to do better” (sexual misconduct’s version of “thoughts and prayers”). Sometimes, I see men making those statements who I know have done very bad things themselves, and it messes with my head. It’s the same circus, every time.

As a result, the transgressions that tend to be widely reported are often, paradoxically, the least vicious. The off-color comment or the wink that gets blown up into a witch trial. These things are easy to denounce, because they’re clearly inappropriate. They fit neatly into the public outrage machine. Meanwhile, a tangle of horrors hang silently in the shadows, looming, and waiting.

When bad things happen to you, you do all the things that these women described in the New Yorker piece. You tell yourself it wasn’t so bad, or maybe it was your fault, or you’re blowing things out of proportion. You might maintain a relationship with that person after, either because you want to normalize what happened, or because you’re afraid, or simply because you can’t avoid them everywhere in your life.

And then you don’t talk about it. Because the people who read and write about Roger Ailes and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby imagine it must go like this: Bad person does something obviously bad to you. You freak out. You tell someone.

My experience goes something like this: Person does something to you. You tell yourself it was actually no big deal. You shut it up in your brain and go on with your life. The thought continues to nag you. You read about other people’s stories and you go nahhh…that wasn’t me. You and this person are FRIENDS, after all! If something bad had happened, you wouldn’t still be friends, would you? You read more stories. You roll your eyes. These women just need to learn to deal with the realities of this industry (which industry? every industry?). You read more stories. You read more stories. You read more stories.

When I read the New Yorker piece, something inside me broke. Because unlike nearly every other story I’d read, it wasn’t a fairy tale of bad man vs. helpless women. It was a ragged, misshapen account of the stories women tell themselves to get past this stuff and move on. Of the assistants and employees who were complicit. Of people wrestling with guilt and self-doubt.

That’s a story I know. I know that one. I have that one every day.

I used to think that not feeling black-and-white about my experiences meant that it must have been my fault, too. Or that maybe what happened really wasn’t that bad.

Now I understand that no matter how extreme the event, I’ll always feel fuzzy about the role I played. And that fuzziness is not because it’s unclear whether “something really did happen” or not, but rather an expected reaction to trauma, in which you try to normalize the behavior and empathize with the other person in order to make sense of the very nonsensical, out-of-control things that have happened to you.

This passage from Sarah Polley sums it up:

Several years ago, I approached a couple of successful female actors in Hollywood about an idea I had for a comedy project: We would write, direct and star in a short film about the craziest, worst experience we’d ever had on a set. We told our stories to one another, thinking they would be hysterically funny. We were full of zeal for this project. But the stories, when we told them, left us in tears and bewildered at how casually we had taken these horror stories and tried to make them into comedy. They were stories of assault. When they were spoken out loud, it was impossible to reframe them any other way. This is how we’d normalized the trauma, tried to integrate it, by making comedy out of it. We abandoned the film, but not the project of unearthing the weight of these stories, which we’d previously hidden from ourselves.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to normalize trauma. And part of that process meant staying silent. Of protecting these dark stories with a fierce intensity, to keep them away from the public eye so that nobody could ever paint me as anything less than who I wanted to be, a narrative that doesn’t include being victimized by anything or anyone. I didn’t ask for this. Maintaining that narrative means maintaining my silence.

But there comes a point where maintaining that silence becomes so ludicrous, when you’re jumping through hoops to avoid sharing identifying details, or smiling and nodding when someone tells you how great that person is, that you wonder, who am I protecting? Myself, or the people who did these things to me?

And what I really want, when I sat down and wrestled with this…what I really want, is to not care anymore. To not have a relationship to these people at all. To feel inertia.

I don’t want a big media blowout over my experiences, because I’d rather define myself by what I do than what’s been done to me. I think that’s why women increasingly report these stories as a group. It’s not just because it makes the evidence more damning. It’s because when it’s one person vs. another, your identity is just as much on the chopping block as theirs, ready to be rewritten. When it’s a group of women against one person, the spotlight shines on that person alone. It’s their character that needs defending. Victims don’t have to be protagonists in a class-action story, and that’s a relief.

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum.

I want to believe that by keeping silent, I’m making the stories go away and living my life as I want. But silence is an active choice, too. Being this quiet, and working this hard to make sure the stories don’t get out, means I am only bonding myself even more irrevocably to these people. Love and hate are equal and opposing forces.

Everybody has a different way of dealing with these incidents. For me, when I’ve truly found my power again, it will be when I don’t care anymore. When seeing their name on social media, or in the news, doesn’t make me flinch. When I don’t walk down the street, or go to an event, with fear of running into them. When seeing their face doesn’t make my heart clench. When I don’t leave an entire industry to get away from those faces.

This isn’t a confessional story. If you read this far expecting me to tell you some juicy lurid tale, it’s not here. This is the story I want to tell. A story about me, not them, and the things people like me tell ourselves in order to protect people like them, and all the shame and embarrassment and hardening of selves that comes with keeping these private stories so close to your heart.

This isn’t a story about sex, assault, or even harassment. It’s the story that accompanies every abuse of power. It’s about anybody who’s used their position to frighten, manipulate or minimize another, and what it’s like to grapple with when you’re on the receiving end.

I may not have shared everything I’ve experienced here, but I’m not keeping it a secret anymore.

The Minimap community was not happy with this change. Many people felt that an open source tool had been hijacked for corporate advertising purposes.

(To wit: Minimap’s maintainer, abe33, had joined Kite as an employee several months before.)

By mid-July, abe33 removed the advertising and publicly apologized for mixing employer and open source objectives. A week later, The Outline published a story about the incident, under the delightfully sensational title, “How a VC-funded company is undermining the open-source community”.

While this story has all the elements of a scandal — venture capital! advertising! open source developers! — I don’t necessarily buy the takeaway.

Firstly, let’s consider what, exactly, was offensive about advertising Kite on Minimap.

It’s not a violation of open source’s legal definition to advertise. In addition, it was maintainer of Minimap who made the change. abe33 has the right to add whatever he likes.

So no official rules were broken. What about unspoken rules?

If it’s about mixing financial interests with open source, we shouldn’t perpetuate the myth that, as Nick Coghlan likes to say, open source is run by “magic Internet pixies” and don’t need anything from us. (Note that Kite does officially sponsor the maintainer’s current work on Minimap.)

Nick Coghlan on Twitter

@yasegumi It *is* getting better, but "open source is made by magic internet pixies that don't need food or shelter" is still weirdly common

There are plenty of projects that monetize, crowdfund, or raise sponsorships to pay for the very valuable work they do. For the most part, those situations don’t seem to bother people.

It’s not specifically about advertising, either. For example, Read the Docs, which operates on a shoestring budget, experiments with ethical advertising as a way for pay for their operations. Advertising, done right, doesn’t need to feel like a violation.

Most likely, this incident felt icky because while Kite might sponsor abe33's work on it today, Kite had nothing to do with the history, popularity, or community associated with Minimap.

Most people don’t like the idea of companies hijacking a community’s trust to insert corporate interests, without adding value.

(In that sense, it’s different even from Google, Facebook, or Twitter’s advertising models, which most of us tolerate because we get a free service in exchange.)

So if the problem wasn’t money or advertising, but Kite intruding into a community where it didn’t belong, what policy changes could take place, as a result of this incident?

In other words, how could one prevent a similar situation from happening again?

There is no project-level policy that could have prevented this from happening. The maintainer himself was the one who implemented the change. (It would be different, for example, had Kite opened a PR suggesting the change, and gotten thwarted by the maintainer and/or the community.)

So instead we’re relying on fuzzy cultural norms, or as The Outline called it, a “basic decorum of transparency”. How does that get enforced?

Well, I think by exactly what did happen. Specifically:

• The maintainer was hand-slapped by the community
• The package was forked
• The maintainer did eventually remove the advertising and issue a public apology
• Kite took a severe brand hit. The incident did not make them look good, and rightly so. They now have to rebuild trust, and I bet they’ll think twice about pursuing this strategy again.

The resolution of this incident contains all the elements of a functional democracy.

Like a democratic government, open source functions on several enforcement mechanisms. Notably:

1. The right to fork. If all else fails, the community can pick up and move elsewhere. This is similar to impeachment.
2. Reputation as currency. A strong negative community reaction eventually persuaded Kite, and abe33, to revert their decision. This is similar to politicians being accountable to popular vote.

A project maintainer is always accountable to their community. abe33 is free to keep Kite’s advertising in his project. It’s his project, and it’s his decision. But the community also has the right to leave if they’re unhappy.

As for Kite, some have criticized their mediocre response, but I wouldn’t worry about it. If Kite doesn’t take steps to fix their reputational missteps, they will eventually lose their customer base.

When democracy functions smoothly, we barely notice its existence. But I think it’s these moments that remind us that the system is truly working.

If nobody were upset, and everybody just rolled over and accepted these decisions, that would be cause for concern. Expressing dissent is a good thing. Using last-resort enforcement mechanisms, like forking, is a good thing. That’s why those freedoms exist.

I don’t think open source is being threatened or undermined by “VC-backed companies”. The outcome suggests to me that it works just fine.

The next company to try a similar stunt will remember what happened to Kite. As long as communities keep calling out bad behavior when it happens, they send a strong signal that their trust can’t be bought so easily.

I write about money, governance, and the internet. Get future posts by email by subscribing here.

I purposely made the terms of the grant open-ended (“whatever you can’t stop thinking about”) to see what people would come up with.

Nearly 2000 applications later, I learned that the scope of people’s dreams is wonderful.

The application reading process

When I first posted the announcement, I expected to receive roughly 200 applications in a month’s time. Instead, I received nearly 2000 applications in a week.

When I filtered out those who missed the deadline or otherwise didn’t follow the rules, I was looking at a pool of just over 1,600 applications to review.

Once I recovered from the shock (and upgraded my Gmail storage), I realized if nothing else, I wanted to make sure people felt heard. So I decided to read every application.

I blocked off evenings and weekends, poured some tea, and immersed myself in email. I listened to the music and YouTube videos that people sent over in their applications. And I read a lot of stories: some of which were deeply sad, others that made me laugh.

What did people propose? There was everything from driving lessons, to taking a special trip, to community organizing, to studying genetics and fossils and dreaming up space missions. I was heartened to see that many people wrote in on behalf of someone else: a spouse, a friend, a coworker.

(I wish I could share more specifics, but I want to respect the confidentiality of the applications.)

I was impressed by the multitude of backgrounds among applicants. Gender was evenly balanced. Applicants were as young as 13 and as old as their late 60s. Every continent besides Antartica was well-represented, with countries ranging from Colombia to Nigeria to Mongolia. And a lot of people identified as immigrants or first-generation children.

I did not receive a single scammy, spammy, joke-y, troll-y type email. Instead, my inbox was filled with an incredible level of sincerity and vulnerability from my fellow humans.

The internet, even in its humor, is often masked in sarcasm and stoicism. This felt…real. Super real.

Money is psychological, not transactional

In addition to reading people’s stories, I also learned about how people relate to money.

Firstly, there was a lot of talk about emotions. Money gives people “breathing room” and space to think and figure things out. Money helps people relax and not feel stressed out. Money helps people get into a creative, productive mindset. Money lets people plan ahead.

Secondly, quite a few people said the simple act of writing their ideas down, and vocalizing it to a stranger, was motivation enough. Others said it helped them just to know that funding like this existed. In a few cases, that was enough to get started.

Jay Liew on Twitter

@nayafia Btw, when I applied for your grant, I wasn't close, but now I launched and got my first happy user emailing me! :) https://t.co/NZboIDw09o

Finally, a lot of people were looking for accountability. Being selected wasn’t so much about needing money as having someone believe in them. The $5K would signify that their idea was worth pursuing.

If nothing else, I was glad to see that the application process was in itself valuable. It made the difficult task ahead of me slightly easier.

The selection process

Given that there were only 3 grants available, the chances of winning a grant were <0.2%. To put that into perspective, it’s about 30x easier to get into Harvard, and about 8x easier to get into Y Combinator.

Given the volume of applications, I immediately gave up on the idea of finding the “best” one. It’d be impossible to pretend that I had complete information to make that decision.

More importantly, the sheer breadth of proposals forced me to think carefully about what I wanted to accomplish with this grant.

As I went deeper into the applications, I thought about two dimensions:

1. Has this person worked to change their circumstances, despite facing challenges? (character)
2. If they succeed, would I personally be excited by the project outcome? (this is, after all, a personal funding experiment)

I had planned on doing a lottery once I got down to the last 100 applicants, but paradoxically, the smaller the pool, the more I became personally attached to each application. So, I just embraced process of elimination and eventually whittled it down from 1600 to less than 10.

Quit burying the lede, Nadia. Who got the grants?

After several video interviews with the finalists, I settled on the following three people:

Brandon Martinez Gonzalez, who wants to accurately predict the U.S. immigration process based on real, reported data.

Brandon came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 3. When he was 18, his life was put on hold while waiting for green card approval. What was supposed to be a 5 week process turned into 5 months in Mexico, a country he’d never lived in, unsure whether he’d be able to attend Columbia University, where he’d been accepted. Eventually, he found a few Facebook groups where people were sharing real-time information about their visa process, which helped him figure out what to really expect. Brandon recently graduated with a computer science degree and works at an immigration law firm.

Taylor Vinson, who’s moving to Washington, D.C. for an internship.

Taylor grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, the first in her family to attend college. Since high school, she’d wanted to move to a city like D.C. She applied to, and was accepted to Howard University, but couldn’t afford the tuition. But she kept busy at her alma mater of Missouri State, finding her own voice, founding a poetry collective, and starting an arts program in her local public school district. She kept looking for ways to get out to D.C., and through a lot of relationship building, found an internship opportunity that could finally help her build a set of connections in a new city.

Anton Sekatski, who needs to finish his bachelor’s degree in order to emigrate to Canada.

Anton grew up in a village in central Russia, and discovered, through reading and watching internet videos, that there was another world he wanted to be a part of. He went to college, but halfway through his degree, he had to drop out to support his mother and brother. Anton taught himself English and software development in order to make a living. He now lives in St. Petersburg and works as a JavaScript developer, but he wants to move Canada, where he thinks he’ll have more opportunities. Applicants with bachelor’s degrees are significantly more likely to get visas, so he’s going to complete his degree in Prague.

I realized that the most impactful thing I could do with these grants is to invest in human potential. All three recipients demonstrated: 1) an ability to think big, 2) a self-starter attitude, and 3) compassion for the world around them.

Enabling others resonates deeply with my personal life goals and mission. And that’s what I’m excited to fund moving forward.

…moving forward, you say?

Yes! There’s going to be a next year!

I’ve decided to call these Helium Grants: https://heliumgrant.org. Why helium? Well, in addition to its buoyant properties, helium is a lot of fun. 😃

I’m still keeping it informal: this is just a personal project without a tax entity, plus additional grants from whomever else would like to sponsor next year (winkwink nudgenudge), but a number of people suggested naming the grant to make it more “real”, so. I’ve named it.

If you’re a curious bystander who’d like to be reminded when applications open up next year, add your email here and I’ll shoot you a note in 2018.

Want to run your own version?

I was able to fund two extra people this year thanks to the generosity of others. A very special thanks to everybody who sponsored a grant: particularly An Anonymous Donor(TM) and Eric Ries, as well as Nathan Sokoll-Ward, who offered to donate $1K into my $5K grant.

A few other people also started their own versions: namely, Nat Friedman, who put up $25K for five grants, Yurii Rashkovskii, who put up a $5K grant, and Saad Hamid, who started a $1K community fund. And there were many others who schemed with friends to crowdfund something similar, or brainstormed ideas for a recurring microgrant fund.

Saad Hamid on Twitter

@nayafia Love this idea so much that I am going to start a $1,000 social good fund for my community. Thanks Nadia!

I honestly hadn’t expected anybody else to chip in, but this ended up being one of the best surprises of the whole experience.

Even among the applications, I noticed a spirit of selflessness rather than competition. A cynic might have expected free money on the internet to unlock the latter, but instead, most people expressed a desire to do the same for someone else one day.

If you want to run your own version, go to town. Feel free to use any of my grant terms. I’d love to hear about it if you do.

I’ve also collected a list of microgrant programs that others have mentioned to me. It’s pretty short right now. If you know of others, add them to that list!

You don’t have to be rich, to rule my world

In the beginning, I wasn’t sure whether $5K would be enough money. In Silicon Valley, people raise hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for their ideas.

This experience has reminded me that $5K is, in fact, a life-changing amount of money for a lot of people. I think we tend to forget that, the more money we make.

You don’t need to be extraordinarily wealthy to kickstart someone else’s dreams. I am financially comfortable right now, but I am not a high net worth individual.

You don’t need a huge audience to reach people, and it doesn’t need to be a large amount of money. For example, Ben Yu is giving away $100 per week on Facebook for similar purposes.

Next year, I may try smaller grants, so I can reach more people. Many applicants proposed ideas in the realm of $2–3K. $2500 is enough to buy a MacBook or pay for a Udacity Nanodegree (two unusually common requests that I received).

If you’re fortunate enough to have extra cash in your pocket, consider giving someone else the financial security and validation they need to take a chance on their ideas.

Thanks, internet, for taking part in this experiment with me!

Want to be reminded when Helium Grants open up again next year? Add your email here: https://goo.gl/forms/iN4o2eZyC81YPXh93

In addition to the job slog, I’d made two Hail Mary bets. One was for a Fulbright research scholarship, to study microfinance institutions in Indonesia (my mother’s home). The other was for a Compton Foundation fellowship, designing a project around climate change investing.

I didn’t get the Fulbright. But I did get an interview with the Compton Foundation.

The Compton Foundation is a modest family foundation, based in San Francisco. They flew me out on the morning of my 21st birthday. I’d never been to the West Coast before.

Standing in front of the Ferry Building on a sunny day, my first thought was “holy shit, this a real place”, followed by “I need to move here”.

I was awarded a $36,000 grant to design a project of my choosing. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was all mine.

My grant came in two payments of $18,000 apiece. The process was simple: they mailed me checks, and I cashed them.

I’ll never forget standing in the bank deposit line, staring at the check in my hand for $18,000. I was a college student with less than $1,000 in my bank account. I had never held a check like this before. And somebody had mailed it to me because they thought I had a good idea.

It’s been nearly a decade, and that feeling hasn’t left me. So today, I’d like to pay it forward. I’d like to offer three $5,000 grants* to someone else out there, no strings attached.

It’s not a ton of money, but I’m hoping it might give someone out there the push they need to make an interesting contribution to the world.

*Thanks to a donor for matching my $5K gift and making it possible to offer two grants initially. After publishing this post, Eric Ries generously offered to sponsor another grant, so now we have three grants!

****NOTE: Applications for this are now closed. See http://www.heliumgrant.org/ for next year’s application. Thanks for your interest!****

The Q&A

What type of project are you looking for?

Whatever you can’t stop thinking about.

I’d like to fund something that’s personally meaningful to you, whether that’s moving to the city of your dreams, building a better mousetrap, or bringing strangers together.

I’ll also prioritize projects where:

• Funding isn’t readily available for this kind of project
• You have a unique take on the project, or your backstory is interesting
• Impact extends beyond the life of your project (ex. new program vs. one-time event)
• Timeline is shorter (ex. 2 months) vs. longer (ex. one year)

Get creative! I’m open to suggestions. While your project should have a sense of beginning and end, I’ll gladly fund exploratory periods like sabbaticals or research.

I’m also happy to consider proposals like an extracurricular class or moving expenses, if they’re a major obstacle standing in between you and your dreams.

When you say “no strings attached”, what does that mean?

I’ll give you 50% up front. I’ll check in with you before sending the second half. Then I’ll do a followup phone call and/or email at the end to hear how it went. That’s it!

Can anybody apply?

Yes: any age, country (see caveats below), industry, job title, philosophy, or stage of life.

How will you send the money?

I can send money via PayPal (you need a PayPal/bank account), Venmo, or mail a check.

I’m outside of the U.S., can I apply?

Yes, as long as you accept PayPal. I’ll also ask that you pay the international fees, which seem to range between 0.5–2%.

I’m not an expert on international payments, so there may be other issues I’m unaware of. If I follow up on your application, I’ll do extra research to make sure we’re all on the same page about fees and legal rigmarole.

How do I apply?

***********NOTE: Applications for this are now closed. I’ve removed my contact info below.************

Please include:

• What your project is
• Why you’re doing it: I’m most interested in this part. Give me your story!
• An estimated project timeline: Broken down by month (or week, if it’s a shorter project)
• A few links to anything that will make me feel like you’re a legit thoughtful person: Your online presence, your favorite YouTube video, whatever — just give me some context on who you are.

Please follow instructions! As a first-pass filter, if you don’t do all of the above (including using only the exact email address above), I will automatically archive your email.

When’s the application deadline?

****I’ve announced the recipients here: https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-to-give-away-5-000-on-the-internet-66cae906ab7e Everybody who responded before the deadline should have received an email response.****

• April 12 (noon PST): applications close. Please honor this deadline: if you send an application after this time, I will automatically delete it.
• May 15: Everyone will probably be notified by this date (this is not an exact date! I will post here when everybody has been notified. Unfortunately I cannot respond to individual inquiries about application status.)

How many projects can I apply with?

I’ll accept up to 3 proposals, but please (for my own sanity, as I’m reviewing these applications by myself) use your best judgment. 1 great application is more likely to catch my eye than 3 random ideas.

Is this an ongoing program? Are you doing this through a foundation?

No. I am a mere mortal with a penchant for weird funding experiments. I’m not receiving a tax deduction. If it’s fun, and people like it, I may do it again next year.

I have another question that’s not listed here.

Comment below and I’ll get to it.