Funding the Commons

Not one event — a programme, filmed as it moved from city to city.

Funding the Commons runs a programme rather than a conference — summits, a hackathon, a builder residency — on the question of how public goods get funded. It asked the crew for recap films: one per event, cut for its own channel, each short enough to be watched by someone deciding whether to come to the next one and honest enough to show the people who came to this one. The ask repeated as the programme moved: San Francisco, then Buenos Aires, then San Francisco again.

The crew had been in those rooms before the camera was.

The engineering studio the crew shares a company with builds for open-source ecosystems, and the people on Funding the Commons’ stages — protocol teams, researchers, the builders in the residency — are the people the studio works beside. That is why the crew could follow a conversation about resilient infrastructure or the human–AI coordination layer without a briefing, and why the films read as reports from inside a community rather than as event marketing. Protocol Labs, whose name is on the coop’s client wall, co-produced the hackathon edition.

Two cities, three formats, one crew based in Paris.

Two cities, three formats — a summit, an overnight hackathon, a residency — and a crew based in Paris. Travel, access, the length of a hackathon night and how many days of a residency a crew can cover are the constraints of the programme; which of them bit hardest is not written up, and this page does not guess.

Each film is built the same way: let the people say what they came for, then let the room make the argument.

A recap film is a documentary at sprint length. Each one is carried by the people in it — the San Francisco film is built on voices from its own stage — and then by the event as a place: the circle in the photograph this page opens on, the hackathon floor through the night with robots in the hallways, the residency’s working rooms in Buenos Aires. The edit runs on what people say and cuts the coverage to it, which is why the films hold together at a length someone will actually watch. Everything was shot and finished in-house.

Three films, one per event, each on Funding the Commons’ channel.

Infrastructures of Resilience: San Francisco — the film of the edition the photograph above is from — then Intelligence at the Frontier, the recap of the hackathon at Frontier Tower in San Francisco, and Inside Our Builder Residency in Buenos Aires. All three were delivered for Funding the Commons’ own channel and are published there under the organisation’s name, which is where a commissioned crew’s work belongs. Each is linked below.

• Source:Infrastructures of Resilience: San Francisco — on Funding the Commons’ channel ↗
• Source:Intelligence at the Frontier — hackathon recap, San Francisco 2026 ↗
• Source:Inside Our Builder Residency in Buenos Aires ↗

The programme kept the crew on as it moved. The rest is the organiser’s to count.

Three films across two years is the outcome that is ours to state: the organisation commissioned the crew again as the programme travelled, from the San Francisco summit to the Buenos Aires residency and back to San Francisco for the hackathon. What the films did for Funding the Commons — who they brought to the next event, how far they travelled — is the organiser’s data, and this page does not borrow an organiser’s figures to stand in for a result.