Funding the Commons Forum: San Francisco
Redefining institutions, infrastructure, and public goods in the age of AI.
The Funding the Commons Forum is a two-day gathering of two hundred researchers, economists, policymakers, engineers, artists, funders, and citizens, brought together around a single question: as AI amasses the largest fortunes since the industrial age, how will that wealth be distributed, and who decides?
Spread widely, this wealth can fund institutions where people take part in the decisions that shape their lives. Held tightly, it leaves those decisions to a handful of stakeholders. Industrial wealth built the university, the library, the public foundation; the institutions of the AI age don't exist yet, and they are still ours to build.
For stakes this high, the conversation about where this wealth goes and who governs it stays surprisingly small, and much of it happens in silos. There is still time to widen it: to gather the people building the models and mechanisms that keep capital and power in the hands of many.
This November we'll do just that over two days of focused sessions and open debate, some of it off the record, meant to start lasting collaborations and research.
"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."
— Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Former Minister of Digital Innovation
The program splits in two
Across both tracks, the people building this future show their work: open models, funding mechanisms, and working prototypes, demonstrated and pressed on by the people making them.
Human Welfare. Will the gains reach everyone?
From economics to environmental science, this track asks what it will take for the gains of abundant intelligence to show up in everyday life, and to last.
Future of work, education, and reskilling
The AI windfall and how it's shared
Data rights and compensation
Care, community, and participation
Public AI and digital infrastructure
Public goods funding mechanisms
Flourishing beyond GDP
Human Agency. Will the world still answer to the people living in it?
This track turns to power: who builds and governs the new systems, and how they stay answerable to the people living with them, from cryptography to constitutional law.
Open models
Sovereign AI and data
AI safety and alignment
Digital human rights, privacy, and identity
Decentralization and power distribution
Public goods funding mechanisms
Information integrity and provenance
Verifiable AI and accountability
Apply to speak
The program is built from the people in it. If you're working on any of this, a model, a mechanism, a policy, or a hard question worth a room, we want to hear from you.
Behind the forum
Funding the Commons is a network advancing how public goods get funded, governed, and coordinated in the era of abundant intelligence. Its work is mechanism design: building and testing the funding mechanisms that public goods depend on, and gathering the interdisciplinary crowd that makes them work, researchers and engineers, economists and artists, policymakers and funders who rarely share a table. Since 2021 it has convened more than 6,500 people and a thousand speakers across four continents. If you'd like to collaborate on the forum, reach out to contact@fundingthecommons.io.
The evening before the forum, we host an invite-only dinner for speakers and special guests, a smaller table before the larger one.
Access matters to us as much as the program does. If you would add to these conversations and none of the ticket tiers fit your situation, write to contact@fundingthecommons.io and tell us what you're working on and why you belong here.