A streaming experiment could be run within a subgroup of the public goods working group, but it is unlikely that the public goods working group would approve the (entire) budget for this purpose.
From what I have observed, the issue with using open voting to fund public goods projects is that the people voting don’t typically have a good understanding of what public goods are. This isn’t necessarily because voters don’t understand the basic characteristics of public goods, being non-rivalrous and non-excludable, but rather that the definition of public goods is not set in web3.
For the purposes of grants rounds, Gitcoin hasn’t adopted a single definition of public goods. Instead, they use voting to show what the community values and distribute matching pool funds accordingly.
Article 3 of the Constitution states that income not used to fund and improve ENS can “be used to fund other public goods within web3”. Before the Public Goods working group can distribute funds to projects deemed to be public goods in web3, it seems prudent to first develop some sort of consensus around what public goods are and what types of public goods should be funded by the ENS DAO.
Questions I feel the PG working group should answer before funding any project include:
- What are public goods within web3?
- What types of public goods should the ENS DAO be funding?
- How is the DAO going to fund those public goods?
Once we have established what public goods are within web3, we then need to develop strategies to distribute funds. A forward-looking model, like streaming, is certainly an option. However, to the extent that streams would need to be topped up at certain intervals and projects can be “fired” at any moment, I question whether this strategy offers more certainty to recipients than something like a Gitcoin Grants round every few months. An alternative method to distribute funds is the retroactive funding model used by Optimism PBC.
Whichever method(s) the ENS DAO chooses to experiment with will likely be decided following discussions within the working group that are able to take place once the definition of a ‘public good within web3’ has been established by the public goods working group.