OpenCivics Grants Round 02 is Live!
Donate To Game Changing Civic Innovation
OpenCivics Consortium Round 02 is now open for donations!
Donations are open April 23 - May 7, 2024.
This round offers a $66,000 USD matching pool to fund critical collaborative protocols, prototypes, and infrastructures that enable civic engagement and interoperable civic utilities.
In this email:
About the Round
Meet our Grantees
Twitter Space Schedule
About our Grants Program
Round Launch - Donations Now Open
We’re incredibly excited to share the grantees selected for our second iteration of OpenCivics Grants.
We received 65 applications and faced the daunting challenge of whittling that list down to 8 projects to meet our goal for the round: to provide meaningful matching funds to projects and empower them to create reportable impacts. In the eleventh hour, we were blessed to receive an additional $25,000 USD from Thank Arbitrum.
Thankfully, this enabled us to expand the pool of applicants to 16 exemplary applicants who we feel are poised to leverage small donations for a large impact and are demonstrative of the wide spectrum of decentralized civics and civic innovation.
These projects range from developing technology, applied research, social processes and more, all related to collaboration and coordination for collective civic action.
Now it’s time to vote with your donations! Which projects do you want to see receive the largest portion of the matching pool? Quadratic Funding is a form of collective intelligence for philanthropy that relies on people like you to donate and vote with your crypto to determine how much of the $66,000 USD in matching funds each project receives. Visit go.opencivics.co/round02 to discover and donate to projects.
If you’re new to web3 and Gitcoin, visit go.opencivics.co/donate to learn how to donate. As always, please reach out to us to answer any questions and help you dive into the wild world of web3!
Meet Our Grantees
Check out the amazing projects that are part of OpenCivics Consortium Round 02!
Agroforest DAO
A rooted community that supports food forest culture.
Crossroads
Crossroads is a free app for nomadic people to find and foster community.
Donate: go.opencivics.co/crossroads_gg20
Voicedeck
VoiceDeck is a new approach to funding high quality journalism with a reward-for-impact approach incentivizing stories that create a positive outcome. These outcomes (such as resignations, court cases or resolution of community issues) are recorded onchain as Hypercerts (a web3 protocol for impact certificates), becoming available for purchase by media funders.
Donate: go.opencivics.co/voicedeck_gg20
Ethereal Forest
Ethereal Forest is doing research, education and advocacy for localist applications of the decentralized web in Portland, Or. We are building out the social infrastructure for a participatory and permissionless PDX DAO.
Urbanika
A regen tech showroom and a Web3 Neighborhood Governance program, all within a bus. Together they aim to facilitate the emergence of smart cities that are peer-governed and regenerative by design.
Bloom Network
Bloom Network helps people discover and spearhead grassroots climate actions where they live, with the support of a platform owned and governed directly by them! With Local Hubs, local media feeds, and a peer-to-peer incubator, we empower people to start and grow projects from A to Z with the support of a passionate global community. https://bloomnetwork.earth
Regenerative Currencies R/Evolution
Welcome to Recurv! A community for those with a fierce love for this planet and willingness to collaborate on the messy creation of a new Human Operating System for Project Earth. We find ourselves in an uncertain time – a time of transition between what is dying and what is yet to be born. We not just learning the rules of a new economy, we generate them. At Recurv we are dedicated to awakening peoples creative power to create currencies that work for everyone and the planet. Our goal is to spark in you a passionate excitement and new capacities to create new and fair economic structures and cultures, life giving incentives and the willingness to initiate change that exists beyond finite monetary outcomes.
Donate: go.opencivics.co/recurv_gg20
Citizen.chat
Citizen.chat creates open-source, privacy first, advocacy Tools for civic action • pact.social, a decentralized manifesto platform • Citizen.chat, a conversational AI factory, with open data at its core.
The River Don Project
The River Dôn Project is demonstrating the first-ever real-time interface between humans and non-human actors.
Donate: go.opencivics.co/riverdon_gg20
MetaGov
Metagov is a nonprofit laboratory for digital governance. Our mission is to cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age. We do this by authoring standards, offering APIs, governance data sets, research, and seminars to improve online community management.
Donate: go.opencivics.co/metagov_gg20
Protopian Civic Futures
A short story contest to call for and exhibit protopian fiction stories that creatively features systems of collective stewardship and care to build a better civilization.
Donate: go.opencivics.co/protopian_gg20
Moos Berlin Hub
The Moos Space is a Berlin incubator for regenerative economic concepts, space-making, community building, creative practices and paradigm shifting projects, that speak to a hopeful future.
Design Science Studio
The Design Science Studio (DSS) utilizes OpenCivics' grant to explore a collaborative protocol to bolster the resilience and evolutionary developmental processes for the initiative. Through vibrant community circles and protocols that embody self-organizing patterns, this research supports the DSS as it cultivates embodied regenerative design principles at the ecosystem level for artistic collaboration and ontological interventions. The outcomes of this creative journey are captured in an ARTicle, an open source toolkit and set of practices for innovation within the organism.
Donate: go.opencivics.co/dss_gg20
Self-Governance Commons
We offer a means of integrating the plurality of research and practice in effective self-governance into open standards for self-governance supported by digital technology in a coordinative platform so that we can actualize the accumulated wisdom into an accessible means for cooperating across difference at scale.
Mycelial Civic Knowledge Networks
Mycelial Civic Knowledge Networks empower grassroots civic participation by combining attestation networks and AI-powered community knowledge graphs. This decentralized infrastructure enables communities to build and share knowledge commons, cultivate collective intelligence, and coordinate impactful ground activities for deep social change.
Donate: go.opencivics.co/mycelial_gg20
Common Agency
Common Agency helps people self-organize their IRL neighborhoods.
Join our Twitter Spaces!
Want to learn about DeCiv, grantee projects, ask questions, and discover synergies? Join us on Twitter for a series of conversations throughout the round! **
OpenCivics Round Showcase: The State Of #DeCiv
Thursday, April 25th at 5pm PST
OpenCivics GG20 — Upgrade The System
Sunday, April 28th at 3p PST
OpenCivics x Climate Program GG20 — Civic Innovation For People & Planet
Tuesday, May 1st at 7p PST
OpenCivics GG20 — Synergistic Coordination
Friday, May 3rd at 9a PST
OpenCivics GG20 — Imagining Civic Futures
Monday, May 6th at 3p PST
Also checkout the calendar of official Gitcoin Twitter Spaces
About Our Grant Program
The OpenCivics Quadratic Funding Grants Program is part of OpenCivics' mission to provide funding and coordination support to projects building and deploying civic utilities, or civilizational public goods. As a steward of these efforts, OpenCivics is committed to utilizing decentralized methods and collective intelligence to curate high-impact civic innovation projects.
By facilitating Quadratic Funding Grants, OpenCivics hopes to empower the development of innovative civic solutions that catalyze a resilient, vital, and participatory civilization, ultimately contributing to the public good.
Civic utilities refer to public goods that are essential for the functioning and well-being of a civilization. These can include infrastructure, technology, and tools for community organizing that are accessible to all members of a society. By providing these utilities, civic innovation projects seek to promote transparency, accountability, and citizen participation in governance and collective stewardship of their communities.
Conclusion
Thank you for donating, sharing, and participating in our promotional activities and Twitter Spaces for this ground round! We remain utterly devoted to providing mechanisms for collective intelligence and coordination that serve our shared mission of civic innovation and societal transformation.
In Us We Trust,
Benjamin, Patricia, and Spencer
OpenCivics Stewards