Web3Privacy Now sustainability paths

[burningtree]

Many of you know us, Web3Privacy Now is a totally non-profit activity and we all do it for free because our motivation is more than just money. It started as a simple Mykola hackathon research project at ETHBrno 2022, which expanded a few months later to a great Summit in Prague, then Rome, and now we're starting to do our own projects like Explorer, writing news and a lot more. All for free, as a service to the community, with zero or minimal budget.

Problem is, this is unsustainable in the long term. We need money to scale further to make bigger impact. As it all grows, we have to decide what path to take. One of those paths is the path of commercialization and corporatization, where we trade openness for money, and honesty for pretense. We each get a nice paycheck and create a hierarchy of superiors.

BUT we don't want to go down that road. We don't want to take this community that trusted us and got us where we are as hostage to achieve some of our own goals. That’s pretty challenge. Commercial deals create a huge imbalance of incentives for the "public good" sector, and it's difficult to keep people building something that makes sense long term.

Membership scheme is a key element in our journey towards financial sustainability. With transparent terms and conditions, should be a clear pathway for all who wish to support us, whether they are individuals or businesses. It should be built in a way that does not compromise our credible-neutrality. Most of the money we raise should go towards our running costs, organising our events and other necessary expenses. We are in the process of setting up a non-profit entity to handle this legally.

As I've written before - we don't want to give ourselves paychecks, nor do we want to go the over-complicated route of paying hourly rates or number of tasks completed. So as a main financial reward system, we are preparing a sort of our own variant of the Protocol Guild, called the Contributors Guild. This Guild would be funded by some percentage cut (20-50%?) from our income and anyone who does long-term activity (or “work") for W3PN will have the opportunity to become a part of this guild and thus receive some financial compensation, based on simple criteria. In simplicity there is power, and we think this system can be much fairer and more scalable. Its also good that it motivates for long-term cooperation, because is a bit retroactive.

Membership as the main method of income and the Contributors Guild as a way of rewarding our contributors are thus crucial concepts for the future of our initiative.

What do you think about this path? Feel free to comment or discuss! 🙏

I have created a new Matrix channel #w3p-governance:gwei.cz channel where we can discuss these concepts and paths in details.