2025-06-27: Budgets, Chasms, Young Mr. Brightside
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Working on:
Budgets, OKRs, Flows 😩
Gripped with terror at having to contribute to such Order Muppet (of Unified Muppet Theory 🄽) core competencies, but everyone needs structure, even us Chaos Muppets. Most usefully, I talked to Matt Zimmermann 🄽 about how to get needs from the ecosystem into a list of pain points, that then leads potentially to our granting system and/or PLFIF funding and/or other teams work. I repeatedly said “I don’t think I know what I’m doing here”, but, on the other hand, I do know that’s what we need.
The timing though! I have to work out the budget and OKRs for Governance, even though as I am scheduled to come up with a concrete figure, juuust before Michael joins us as the new head of Governance! I will beg some leeway on deadlines so we can at least get his input.
Thinking about:
Decentralization Advocacy
Meeting with Mike Masnick 🄽 and Cathy Gellis 🄽 of Copia Institute 🄽 / Tech Dirt 🄽, to brainstorm potential collaboration opportunities. We are all very much on the same page in terms of the benefits (and pitfalls) of decentralized technology, so it was good to dive much more deeply into strategy. We’re in somewhat of a chasm (as in Marketing Chasm 🄽) at the moment in decentralizing-land. We’ve spent years re-introducing the idea, but now people (readers and developers alike) are a bit bored of hearing that, and now we’re stuck in the boring, much harder, “make pretend real” period. From Techdirt’s point of view, that means “what can we talk about that’s interesting”. From FFDW 🄽 ‘s point of view “what kind of writing can we support that gets us all across this chasm”. “Success stories” is the obvious goto but, I even think “look at this decentralized tool that is taking off” is a bit dull nowadays — there are only so many articles about Bluesky 🄽 or Mastodon you can write, before the hivemind turns to contrarian “but maybe it will still fail?” thought pieces.
I think we got some progress though in thinking about how to combine descriptions of intriguing tech, with demos of that tech, in a way that is self-contained to the journalistic product itself. Cathy and I really also want to inject some policy analysis into this too, though. Maybe we’re overegging the pudding? But this is just a first stab.
Link du jour:
- /r/preformances/ - A subreddit documenting recordings of musicians and actors before they were famous. Here’s Nirvana playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to an audience that had never heard of it, B-52s live from a cafe in 1976, and an unknown band called the Killers playing their new song, “Mr. Brightside”.