The nem community fund is growing rapidly, and many good companies are being awarded funding. It works well-ish in its current form, however it could be greatly improved and doesn’t really scale too well in its current form nor is it very sustainable.
Some idea’s i have been toying with include:
Making it more sustainable/self sufficient by acting more as a VC fund which takes some amount of equity in the funded companies. Given it would be a non profit in the sense that there are no shareholders, returns from equity ownership could be divided up between various initiatives aimed at adoption and sustainability of the entire nem ecosystem.
It would allow the community fund itself to employ full time staff dedicated to specific areas from proposal approval pre-public announcement, milestone reviews, due diligence and investigation prior to funding, networking, development manpower for funded companies and so forth.
Some profits could be fed back into the fund to replenish NCF capital for future investments.
Some could be allocated to supernodes in order to increase the sustainability of that programme until it becomes sustainable in its own right through some other mechanism (Think AI running side by side with nodes and pays for idle resources or a decentralised high speed exchange or something like that).
Some could go towards development efforts by employing full time devs that can be contracted out to companies in need or to focus on other nem ecosystem infrastructure like mobile wallets etc.
Incubators for funded companies are also a possibility.
Given the entity would be acting purely on the behalf of the community and nem ecosystem, transparency would be key, so a financial report/summary could be released once a year keeping the community in the loop and allowing questions to be asked if needed. This would also help maintain integrity within the entity and hopefully prevent abuse. Ultimately the entity should aim to be answerable to the community, even if only in a symbolic manner.
However, this all would require the fund being controlled by a legal entity (a non profit company akin to the foundations structure but with a very different mandate) and that i think would of course require the approval of the community.
There are not any reasons i can think of why proposals couldn’t still be put before the community for voting in most cases unless the company applying for funding has some specific reason why it can’t do this (releasing info to competitors etc.).
If you have any criticism of the idea, idea’s you want to contribute, or if you would generally support the idea, please leave a comment and give your two cents.