Join us in San Francisco on 14-15 March. Register on Luma.
Advancing the future of coordination and funding
2-Day Vertical Festival at the Frontier Tower
San Francisco | March 14-15, 2026
Technology is exposing the breaking points in our institutions. We’re preparing for superintelligence by putting the coordination systems in place.
Join 1,000 researchers, builders, investors, and artists for a vertical festival across 16 floors on March 14-15.
Expect talks, live funding experiments, prototyping, a 2-day physical intelligence hackathon, and of course what SF does best: art and music.
A 36-Hour Intelligence Hackathon
San Francisco | March 14-15, 2026
Frontier intelligence is advancing fast. We’re building the coordination layer to make it usable, verifiable, and aligned with human flourishing.
Join 250+ builders across physical AI, robotics, neurotechnology, world models, agentic funding, XR, and sovereign infrastructure for a 36-hour sprint at Frontier Tower, alongside the main event. Teams will build and test prototypes that expand human agency and strengthen real-world coordination.
Registration link coming soon.
The Coordination Layer
The systems we use to fund and govern shared resources—open-source software, digital public infrastructure, scientific research, even our planet—were built for a different era. They are slow, opaque, and often disconnected from the people closest to the problems. As AI reshapes how value is created and distributed, improving these systems is not optional.
We accelerate the development of coordination infrastructure for public goods: funding mechanisms, governance systems, and programmable tools that move capital and support shared resources.
The people working on this—across frontier labs, universities, government agencies, open-source communities, and protocol teams—are often addressing different parts of the same challenge without being in the same room. We bring them together and provide the tools, funding, and institutional connections to build in alignment.
The Context
The pressure on existing systems is coming from multiple directions.
The funding gap is widening.
Climate risk, displacement, and demographic change are increasing pressure on social protection, climate and nature finance, and civic infrastructure. Public budgets and philanthropy are not enough to meet the scale.
The coordination tools are changing.
Frontier technologies are alterring how value and information move. They can reinforce opacity—or support more transparent and accountable systems for funding public goods.
Trust is fragile, but the demand for accountability is rising.
Governments, multilaterals, and philanthropies face growing scrutiny over where money goes and what it achieves. Communities want more visibility and participation. Existing systems were not designed for that level of transparency.
Public goods funding will either be embedded into emerging financial and digital infrastructure—or layered on later. The outcome depends on what gets built and adopted now.
We Bring Together
[ Builders ]
Engineers, developers, and open-source maintainers creating funding tools, governance systems, allocation mechanisms, and coordination technology.
[ Researchers ]
Economists, mechanism designers, AI governance scholars, and social scientists studying how shared resources get funded and governed at scale.
[ Funders ]
Foundations, protocol treasuries, and institutional investors deploying capital for public benefit.
[ Policymakers ]
Government officials shaping rules, standards, and regulatory frameworks at every level—municipal, national, and international.
[ Civic Sector ]
Mission-driven organizations building public infrastructure—from internet freedom tools to refugee reunification platforms.
[ Multilateral Institutions ]
International bodies piloting new funding and governance systems in the field, from UNDP to UNICEF Office of Innovation to the World Bank.
Conferences
Every piece of the solution exists. The people holding them have never been in the same room.
Where policymakers, researchers, builders, and funders share the same room and the same problems.
Notable Past Speakers
Audrey Tang
Taiwan's Former Minister of Digital Innovation
What I really like about the Funding the Commons community is that people openly talk about failures—talking about issues that are instrumental, things that really didn’t work right. And so, this particular venue, Funding the Commons, brings together not just the visionaries but also the actual engineers that can make such visions even more feasible for the future generations.
Al Smith
Tor Project
I started participating in Funding the Commons because I was looking for other ways to fund open-source software. We were running into these problems of sustainability at the Tor Project, and Funding the Commons was offering a completely new vision of what it looks like to fund something that's open and free.
Chris Szymczak
UNICEF Office of Innovation
I'm super excited about UNICEF’s relationship with Funding the Commons, and we see eye to eye when it comes to values and the things that we believe in. We see eye to eye thinking about technology in a positive way, that technology actually can do something for good.
Community Love
Media Lab
Curious about public goods funding culture?
Interviews, analysis, and field dispatches from the people building coordination infrastructure for public goods. We capture what happens when researchers, policymakers, builders, and funders work on the same problems in the same room—and publish the ideas that come out of it.
Have something to contribute?
