Over the course of 2023, the Ethereum Public Goods ecosystem found itself in an almost manic stage of experimentation, branching out in challenging design vectors that had our community doing what it does best. Responses to the provocation put forth by Optimism's retroactive funding infrastructure have proliferated in the direction of impact attestations, peer review networks, prospective funding and crowdfunding, and teams like RegenLearnings actively continue to investigate the theoretical edges of the funding allocation problem.

If this concert of ambitious and internally complex initiatives is still in infant stage, it's less a problem of mechanism design, and more one of mutual coherence: that is, how these tools fit together with each other, and how that resonance creates a story that can be told to a broader world of impact creators.

Hyperactive Public Goods Funding (HPGF) is our name for a generative synthesis of these many protocols, the emergent properties that arise when different mechanisms are fused into a well-oiled, feedforward machine of sustainable impact. Hyperactive funding finds synergy between prospective crowdfunding strategies, impact attestation and evaluation and the participatory retroactive funding mechanisms developed by the Optimism community, charging the legitimacy of each with the variable weight of the other. With repeatable cultural institutions grounded in empiricism and predictable patterns, individuals and organizations can contribute funds in an atmosphere of mutual conviction that begins to look more like cooperation than charity.

If that synthesis has remained illusive up to this point, we think it’s a result (ironically) of the failure of this community to see the emergent gravity and urgency of this work - the paradigm shift it could offer to the kind of commons-oriented work our society has spent decades disincentivizing. Call it feature creep, or a type of technological bikeshedding, but there comes a time when the insular design vectors of a technical community become less valuable than those that could arise from widespread public or consumer engagement. We are desperately in need of non-technical communities to show us the path to transformative global consequence, the forest we know is hidden in the trees.

The HPGF Ecosystem Support Machine (hESM) is a workgroup aiming to address this tension. We are using research and feedback from non-technical impact communities to iteratively develop the scattered components of the Ethereum public goods ecosystem into meta that will work for the specific tactical and strategic demands of a community, with an eye toward legibility, accessibility and large-scale value gained.

This work isn't simply focused on the exterior. Contrary to the thesis of "take care of our own systems first," we are of the belief that richly engaging specific impact communities and refining materials and systems to onboard those communities will have a crucial reciprocal benefit for the public goods space and the wider Ethereum ecosystem in its development capacities. It will take outside eyes for the public goods community to develop a self-image that will bridge our work from technological ingenuity to transformative social impact.

By acting as facilitators, bridge builders, knowledge sharers, and translators between the technically adept Web3 natives and the broader, non-technical audiences who stand to benefit immensely from these innovations, we intend a feedback loop where ecosystem developers and new communities can grow together, shaped to the strategic contingencies of each community as they make use of the HPGF toolkit to their own ends. If there will one day be a monolithic Hyperactive public goods meta, it will have been forged in the flames of strategic contingency, the demands - in a time of high stakes - of work that matters.

Follow us as we launch our website, develop onboarding materials, compile user feedback, and propose protocols of engagement between various mechanisms in the HPGF ecosystem. Our next piece will be addressing the merits of our first community of focus, the global investigative commons, a community with dramatic convergence with the very concerns of the web3 public goods space. We will be introducing our first onboarding games in that space, which will require help from the community.

Also watch out for side projects we are launching within the web3 community for the sake of documentation and data collection.

Finally, we hope to coordinate and create dialogue between ourselves and other Ecosystem Support Machines as we formalize and develop best practices around this new, extitutional form. Our work in no way intends to reinvent the wheel - if we as a community develop a language for offloading support tasks to the most refined resources for a given problem, we will all benefit from the network commons generated.

If you are a developer with an open source tool that belongs in our meta, another ESM that would like to discuss collaboration, or have a project that could benefit from HPGF funding strategies, don't hesitate to hit us up at hpgf-esm@pm.me!

The HPGF ESM work has been made possible thus far by a generous grant from Public Nouns. To provide continued support of our work, contribute to our Yeeter.

Over the course of 2023, the Ethereum Public Goods ecosystem found itself in an almost manic stage of experimentation, branching out in challenging design vectors that had our community doing what it does best. Responses to the provocation put forth by Optimism's retroactive funding infrastructure have proliferated in the direction of impact attestations, peer review networks, prospective funding and crowdfunding, and teams like RegenLearnings actively continue to investigate the theoretical edges of the funding allocation problem.

If this concert of ambitious and internally complex initiatives is still in infant stage, it's less a problem of mechanism design, and more one of mutual coherence: that is, how these tools fit together with each other, and how that resonance creates a story that can be told to a broader world of impact creators.

Hyperactive Public Goods Funding (HPGF) is our name for a generative synthesis of these many protocols, the emergent properties that arise when different mechanisms are fused into a well-oiled, feedforward machine of sustainable impact. Hyperactive funding finds synergy between prospective crowdfunding strategies, impact attestation and evaluation and the participatory retroactive funding mechanisms developed by the Optimism community, charging the legitimacy of each with the variable weight of the other. With repeatable cultural institutions grounded in empiricism and predictable patterns, individuals and organizations can contribute funds in an atmosphere of mutual conviction that begins to look more like cooperation than charity.

If that synthesis has remained illusive up to this point, we think it’s a result (ironically) of the failure of this community to see the emergent gravity and urgency of this work - the paradigm shift it could offer to the kind of commons-oriented work our society has spent decades disincentivizing. Call it feature creep, or a type of technological bikeshedding, but there comes a time when the insular design vectors of a technical community become less valuable than those that could arise from widespread public or consumer engagement. We are desperately in need of non-technical communities to show us the path to transformative global consequence, the forest we know is hidden in the trees.

The HPGF Ecosystem Support Machine (hESM) is a workgroup aiming to address this tension. We are using research and feedback from non-technical impact communities to iteratively develop the scattered components of the Ethereum public goods ecosystem into meta that will work for the specific tactical and strategic demands of a community, with an eye toward legibility, accessibility and large-scale value gained.

This work isn't simply focused on the exterior. Contrary to the thesis of "take care of our own systems first," we are of the belief that richly engaging specific impact communities and refining materials and systems to onboard those communities will have a crucial reciprocal benefit for the public goods space and the wider Ethereum ecosystem in its development capacities. It will take outside eyes for the public goods community to develop a self-image that will bridge our work from technological ingenuity to transformative social impact.

By acting as facilitators, bridge builders, knowledge sharers, and translators between the technically adept Web3 natives and the broader, non-technical audiences who stand to benefit immensely from these innovations, we intend a feedback loop where ecosystem developers and new communities can grow together, shaped to the strategic contingencies of each community as they make use of the HPGF toolkit to their own ends. If there will one day be a monolithic Hyperactive public goods meta, it will have been forged in the flames of strategic contingency, the demands - in a time of high stakes - of work that matters.

Follow us as we launch our website, develop onboarding materials, compile user feedback, and propose protocols of engagement between various mechanisms in the HPGF ecosystem. Our next piece will be addressing the merits of our first community of focus, the global investigative commons, a community with dramatic convergence with the very concerns of the web3 public goods space. We will be introducing our first onboarding games in that space, which will require help from the community.

Also watch out for side projects we are launching within the web3 community for the sake of documentation and data collection.

Finally, we hope to coordinate and create dialogue between ourselves and other Ecosystem Support Machines as we formalize and develop best practices around this new, extitutional form. Our work in no way intends to reinvent the wheel - if we as a community develop a language for offloading support tasks to the most refined resources for a given problem, we will all benefit from the network commons generated.

If you are a developer with an open source tool that belongs in our meta, another ESM that would like to discuss collaboration, or have a project that could benefit from HPGF funding strategies, don't hesitate to hit us up at hpgf-esm@pm.me!

The HPGF ESM work has been made possible thus far by a generous grant from Public Nouns. To provide continued support of our work, contribute to our Yeeter.