Sam Richards

A personal wiki, blog, and archive.

/threads/governance · last updated: oct 2026

Governance

Private voting, public-goods funding, and decisions inside organizations.

posts talks projects

I first used MACI while contributing to clr.fund in 2021. Quadratic funding lets communities direct a matching pool toward projects they value, but public votes make bribery easier to verify. MACI uses encrypted ballots and secret key changes to make vote buying harder to enforce. I later led its engineering team and taught the system in workshops and talks.

At PSE, governance also meant deciding how an organization spent its time and money. As cluster lead I set priorities, allocated budgets, and worked with team leads to decide what to continue, coordinate, or stop. The roadmaps here show those decisions alongside the voting and funding work.

Projects

Writing and talks