Grants, General Assemblies, Newsletter, and more!
We have a wide range of exciting OpenCivics updates to share with you.
Join a General Assembly
OpenCivics’ Grants Program: Consortium Round
Meet OpenCivics’ New Steward: Spencer Saar Cavanaugh
OpenCivics Organizational Development
The OpenCivics Monthly Newsletter & Podcast
Join a General Assembly
🏛️ Our General Assemblies are resuming this Tuesday, April 2nd at 3:30p PT / 4:30p MT / 5:30p CT / 6:30p ET and will take place every other week moving forward. Subscribe to the OpenCivics Calendar to stay updated.
General Assemblies are biweekly open calls for OpenCivics members to meet and connect. Our mission as a Consortium is to increase connectivity and collaborative potential between our members. Consider attending the OpenCivics General Assembly calls to access high signal updates from relevant projects, organizations, and initiatives, participate in collaborative open spaces where you’ll be able to rapid prototype, brainstorm, or receive feedback from peers, and stay up to date on the latest activities of the network.
OpenCivics’ Grants Program: Consortium Round
💸 We’re excited to announce the return of our quadratic funding grants program with our second round using Gitcoin’s Allo protocol. Applications will open on April 9th and will close on April 19th.
OpenCivics has been selected by the Gitcoin Community Council to receive an additional $25,000 in matching funds for our upcoming Grant Round! Thanks to the generous support of DeCiv Foundation and Gitcoin, we’ve increased our matching pool to over $45,000 USD equivalent in ETH.
Be sure to join our Telegram group for updates and application links coming soon and make sure to apply before April 16th to ensure Round Operators will have time to review your application.
Grant Round Innovations
As civic innovators ourselves, the OpenCivics Stewardship team is exploring two distinct innovations in our participatory grant program’s structure and strategy.
First, we’re beginning to explore new impact measurement, reporting, and validation processes through an initial experiment in permissionless, p2p, fully decentralized attestation and certification. Grantees selected to participate in the round will be instrumental in the development of our approach to impact measurement and reporting and should expect to submit documentation of their projected key milestones that they will accomplish with funding they receive from the round. Applicants should be sure to craft achievable milestones that can be accomplished using the likely range of grant round funds they may receive ($3,000 - $7,000 USD equivalent). These milestones will be adapted into an on-chain attestation schema that Round Operators, fellow OpenCivics members, and any member of the public can verify, creating a transparent, auditable, on-chain semantic web of impact that can be built upon by various forms of public utilities for rewarding and connecting impact entrepreneurs.
Second, OpenCivics Round Operators will be prioritizing applications that fund collaboration between multiple members or organizations on open source templates, utilities, or open standards. In particular, we are interested in groups forming around research and development of governance toolkits and open data standards/schemas for social impact. We won’t be limiting participation in the round to collaborative initiatives, but we are interested in utilizing grant funding to catalyze inter-organizational collaboration on key shared utilities that benefit the public.
Meet OpenCivics’ New Steward: Spencer Saar Cavanaugh
👤 We’re excited to welcome Spencer Saar Cavanaugh aka Clinamenic as our newest Steward. He’s already bringing his vast expertise in on-chain governance and socio-technical engineering to champion our progressive decentralization roadmap.
The role of Stewardship for a decentralized network like OpenCivics is demonstrated through self-leadership and selfless contribution to shared efforts beyond one’s self.
From the very beginning of OpenCivics, Spencer has leaned in to offer support, thought leadership, and acts of service such that it has felt incredibly natural and fitting to invite him into the role of Steward. Spencer brings a wealth of experience and insight into on-chain governance design and will be leading OpenCivics’ progressive decentralization roadmap in addition to championing other efforts within the broader web3 social impact space. We feel blessed and lucky to have him onboard as a friend and collaborator.
OpenCivics Organizational Development
💼 We’re starting to explore incorporating three new legal entities to support the work of OpenCivics: OpenCivics Labs, OpenCivics Foundation, and the OpenCivics Consortium.
Per our Strategic Plan, OpenCivics has begun to explore incorporating a series of legal entities to fulfill the overall mission of OpenCivics.
This January, OpenCivics co-founders Patricia and Benjamin traveled to Costa Rica to offer their services to an emerging collaborative network seeking to form a consortium for the synergistic co-development of key infrastructures for the bioregional movement. We quickly realized that the mission and design of OpenCivics were much broader than the OpenCivics Consortium. Our experience in Costa Rica demonstrated that many projects and networks wouldn’t need or desire to bring their efforts under the umbrella of the OpenCivics Consortium but would need the ecosystem coordination function that is the core ethos of OpenCivics. As such, we hypothesized that we would need to create a third entity, OpenCivics Labs, to offer ecosystem coordination, governance design, knowledge management, and facilitation as a consortium offerings.
As a result, we’ve started the process to engage legal counsel to design the multi-organizational legal framework that will link OpenCivics Labs, OpenCivics Foundation, and the OpenCivics Consortium. We see OpenCivics Labs as a for-benefit cooperative service provider and facilitators guild in which ecosystem coordinators can pool together their strengths and talents in service of decentralized collaborative networks like the OpenCivics Consortium and the many others we imagine will continue to emerge as humanity begins to awaken to the complexity of our current systemic challenges and the need for ecosystem coordination. We see the OpenCivics Foundation as the intermediary between the OpenCivics Consortium, OpenCivics Labs, and the world of traditional non-profits. We’re aiming to create a legal vessel that can receive tax deductible donations on behalf of the Lab and the Consortium, directing funds into both the self-governed Treasury of the OpenCivics Consortium DAO as well as to provision resources for the core network stewardship services needed to keep the Consortium healthy and well facilitated. The OpenCivics Consortium will be legally incorporated as a DAO when we reach the appropriate phase of our progressive decentralized roadmap and will operate as a completely self-governed entity.
We feel this trifecta of legal instruments is the optimum balance of powers and legal affordances to empower the maximum impact OpenCivics can towards actualizing our purpose.
The OpenCivics Monthly Newsletter & Podcast
🎙️ Look out soon for a new monthly newsletter from OpenCivics Stewards in which you’ll be able to read updates, announcements, and opportunities and listen to OpenCivics members share a deep dive into their work on the OpenCivics Podcast.
Even with membership only having been open for a few months, we already have an incredible roster of members in the OpenCivics Consortium with inspiring projects and updates to share. A OpenCivics newsletter will arrive in your inbox each month with key announcements regarding upcoming calls, engagement opportunities, and events across web3, civic innovation, and systems change ecosystems that OpenCivics Stewards and members track and participate in.
Each newsletter will include a link to that month’s episode of the OpenCivics Podcast which will profile one (or more) of our members each month in a long form episode designed to expand your understanding of their field of expertise as well as to expose new surface area for potential collaboration and synergy.
If you’re a member of OpenCivics and would like to be profiled on the OpenCivics Podcast, jump in on Telegram and let us know!
The newsletter will be available exclusively to OpenCivics Consortium members and Sponsors so be sure to register as a member or consider becoming a Sponsor to receive this high signal monthly asset that will provide various streams of value for our members.
Conclusion
There are many more collaborative opportunities and updates that couldn’t fit in this already-lengthy update email. To get involved in the exciting upcoming activities of OpenCivics, be sure to put our next General Assembly call on your calendar by subscribing to the OpenCivics Calendar (by clicking the + button on the bottom right of the screen) and make sure you’ve joined the OpenCivics Community Telegram channel for other updates.
We look forward to designing, building, embodying, and co-creating humanity’s thriving future with you.
In us we trust,
OpenCivics Stewards
Benjamin Life, Patricia Parkinson, Spencer Saar Cavanaugh
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