Municipal infrastructure is a special type of public good which has multiple limitations compared to general public goods commonly funded by Gitcoin.
Limitations
- Space There is limited usable space, and it can only be used in one way. It can’t be both a park and a road.
- Plans The city usually has a plan for what should be built where. The citizens and other actors can influence this plan to achieve their goal. But once a public good is in an adopted plan, it only means it’s allowed to be built, and the space is reserved for it, but there is still long way until it can get built.
- Management Only institutions designated for it by laws can manage municipal infrastructure. Often a single institution is appointed Manager. Manager then decides that gets built, when and how.
- Time Getting an institution to create a new public good can takes years of exhaustive administrative procedures.
- Procurement
Unlike how anyone can start building open source software and get funding for it on Gitcoin, not everyone can start building it. Law ensures that it can be done either directly by the Manager, or by a service provider chosen through a public tender.
These limitations create special requirements for a pilot municipal QF project.
Requirements
- Acceptable interventions
- Eligible spaces Interventions can only be done on land owned (with clear ownership) by the City and other participating parties. Lot of publicly accessible spaces is under unresolved ownership, or owned by other governmental institutions or even central government. This complicates the process of management. Citizens are rarely aware of these conditions and might want to propose interventions on spaces which are administratively out of city’s reach. To avoid confusion, it is necessary to find all eligible land and only allow proposals on it.
- Eligible providers Unlike Gitcoin, only a designated institution can conduct the intervention. This means that all the donations go to this institution which then spends it to implement the intervention.
- Limited project budget For each project there is a known cost of implementation. No additional funding is needed, and if the project doesn’t reach the full funding, a decision needs to be made if the project will be partially implemented or not at all.
- Value Added Tax As in this case all the donations and subsidies go directly to the for-profit company (Parkovi i nasadi d.o.o.), the legal basis for these transactions will be an invoice for services. We need to explore alternative options to save the cost of tax.
There is a limited number of types of spacial interventions which can be done by individual institutions. Citizens can propose any type of intervention, but it can’t get any funding from municipal matching pool until it’s adopted in the plans.
This is why it is necessary to scope out what types of common interventions in public spaces which don’t require special approvals and administrative procedures.
