Why this matters for the dweb

The infrastructure everyone depends on is maintained by people who can't depend on being paid. Every funding source for open source is someone else's money, governed by someone else's priorities: industry funds the work that serves industry, philanthropy funds what fits the grantmaker's program and ends when the program does, governments fund on policy cycles. The community that actually builds and maintains the infrastructure, as well as the communities that depend on it, never hold the purse. They receive from it, on terms set elsewhere.

This is the reason open infrastructure has no seat at any table. When industry sets the terms of the ecosystems it extracts from, when regulators write the rules for digital infrastructure, when funders decide what counts as critical, open source is in the room as a supplicant, or not in the room at all. Unfortunately, money is what converts a dependency into a peer. A community that owns no money of its own has no standing, no leverage, and no durable voice in decisions about its own future. This is as true of the dweb's own stack as it is of the rest of open source.

This is a governance problem, and it is the question the dweb already works on everywhere else: how does a community own and steer shared infrastructure without a central owner? The Open Source Endowment (OSE) is one concrete, running experiment that turns that question on the money itself.

OSE is a community-governed fund. The design rests on three deliberate moves, each of them a bet:

• The community owns the money. Donor-members govern the fund. The people who build and depend on open source hold the purse, rather than receiving from someone else's. Ownership, not grants.
• Govern the model, not the picks. Donor-members don't vote project-by-project. They develop, debate, and vote on the distribution model, the criteria and algorithm that decide funding each round. You govern the rule, and the rule scales. The long-term plan is multiple continuous competing models the community chooses between.
• Perpetual and transparent, so it can't be taken away. Donations become principal; principal is preserved; only returns are distributed. The fund compounds instead of draining and can't be defunded by a single party losing interest. Governance records and the distribution models live in public repositories anyone can read, fork, and contribute to.

OSE launched with $750K+ committed from 60+ founding donors and is now running its first distribution cycles. That makes it old enough to have results, and young enough that the honest answer to most design questions is still "we don't know yet." This talk is built around that honesty: it is as much about what is unresolved as what works.

What I'll cover

A 15-minute talk with a built-in discussion period.

The talk (≈15 min)

• The problem (≈3 min). Open infrastructure owns none of its money. Every funder is someone else, with someone else's priorities — which is exactly why open source has no seat at the industry, policy, or philanthropy tables where its future gets decided.
• The answer (≈6 min). OSE as a community-governed fund: the three design moves — the community owns the money, governs the distribution model rather than individual grants, and holds it in a perpetual, transparent structure. Concretely, how a donor-member community moves from "here is money" to "here is the rule we agreed on for distributing it."
• What's still unsolved (≈3 min). The honest part. The plutocracy risk in any donor-weighted vote — does "the community owns it" quietly become "the biggest donors own it"? Voter turnout and the engagement problem. Quantified "impact" criteria that can be gamed or can encode bias. Real, open design questions.
• What we've learned so far (≈3 min). Results from the first year and the first distribution cycles — what the community actually chose, where the model held, where it didn't.

The discussion period (≈15 min)

• Open discussion (≈13 min). I put the talk's unsolved questions back to the room — does donor-weighted ownership quietly become plutocracy, how do you get turnout, can quantified "impact" criteria be gamed — and we work them together. This room thinks about community ownership and governance of shared infrastructure for a living, so OSE's design gets sharper for being argued with here.
• The takeaway (≈2 min). Open infrastructure needs its own money to have a seat at the table — including the dweb's own. Where the work continues, in the open