Carl Cervone

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Essays

Here are some of my (current) favorites.

• A eulogy for USAID
• On the road to Agaro
• Busa Bechane and the arrest of Abaznab
• Reflections on a trip to Yunnan and Papua New Guinea
• A cleaner world, door by door
• The most important lesson that I learned in my 20s
• Running the wrong marathon
• Coffee needs protocol leaders
• The past, present and future of public goods funding
• Levels of the game: the psychology of RetroPGF
• The most interesting economic experiment you’ve never heard of
• NYC Pizza Bracket: a quest to find the best pizzeria in New York City

Here is more of my online writing, from oldest to newest.

• My grant proposal for a DIY Peace Corps experience
• Mailing provisions to Tanzania
• Mobile deposit vouchers: a pre-M-Pesa concept note for mobile banking
• The Lemon Award: financial transparency & good governance in cooperatives
• Applying the Harper’s Index to the NYC subway
• Trip report on China’s coffee sector
• It’s 2020: the role data can play in the next decade’s sustainability targets
• A snapshot of coffee farming conditions in Yemen
• Joyplotting coffee and altitude
• Topographic colormaps
• Notes on the intersection of gift and market economies
• Reflections on Funding the Commons
• Does your food have eight forms of capital in it?
• Reflections from my first days working on hypercerts
• A Greenpill manifesto
• Impact evaluations for 158 Gitcoin Grants — and the 30 I chose to fund
• Funding for impact, not intention
• The career of Albert Tucker: an oral history project
• A call for more programmable retro-funding for digital public goods
• Maximizing the impact of RetroPGF: a review of RPGF2
• Analysis on the 300+ OSS projects applying for RetroPGF 3
• Cradle-to-unicorn public goods funding
• Long tail public goods funding
• What builders can learn from RetroPGF 3: separating the signal from the noise
• Opening the RetroPGF ballot box: analysis on 21,813 anonymous votes
• A longitudinal assessment of Gitcoin Grants impact on open source developer activity
• Measuring the impact of open source software (Funding the Commons April 2024)
• Exporting public goods funding beyond our immediate circles
• What’s been the impact of Retro Funding so far?
• W.A.R. for public goods
• Building a network of Impact Data Scientists
• You should spend more time on the bird app: a review of rotki
• Early experiments with synthetic controls and causal inference
• Weeknotes: an experiment in measuring my own work