Session: A Web3 DAO Blueprint for Gamified Open Source Ecosystem Catalyzation
The 2021 Tidelift Open Source Maintainer Survey revealed that 46% of open source maintainers receive no compensation for their project maintenance work. Only 6% earn more than $50,000 per year–arguably fair compensation for this valuable professional skill. The Tidelift survey concludes that open source maintenance work is often stressful, thankless and financially unrewarding. This is troubling given the existential importance of OSS to our economy. Can we design a better open source ecosystem, with compensation, that is less exploitive, and that leads to more innovation while creating better software? Running an open source ecosystem is expensive. But the organizational structures we use to fund them are inefficient. This talk posits that by creating decentralized autonomous organizations (“DAOs”), based on distributed ledger technology, we can define new ways to fund and organize open source ecosystems and allocate value. DAOs are particularly well suited to coalesce a globally distributed network of people with varying levels of commitment. DAOs can access labor anywhere in the world. This would result in better outcomes for everyone: open source creators, vendors who commercialize open source software, and people or organizations who use open source software. Fundamentally, we need less open source kumbaya, and more ways to effectively organize. Will Web3 help us move in that direction?
