Table of Contents
OK we have to do this
Requirements
Project proposals are written in English and:
should be in line with the NGI vision and the call applied for
should have research and development as their primary objective
should be complete and concise (think: no longer than two pages for the main application)
should satisfy any other hard eligibility criteria specific to the call
All projects that fail on any of these knock-out criteria, will not be further reviewed and will be marked ineligible.
Apply for a grant
Next deadline: April 1st 2022 12:00 CET (noon)
This form can be used to request support for your project. Note that some larger funds like NGI Assure Fund (part of the Next Generation Internet initiative) have special and strict conditions, and you'd better have a look at them before you submit a proposal.
Also note that releasing software, hardware and content under libre/open licenses, and the application of open standards where possible are transversal requirements for all.
From our end we will provide a transparent and efficient selection process. Please check the call-specific guide for applicants for the call you are interested in.
Please also don't forget to look into our privacy statement about how we deal with your information (should be a pleasant surprise, actually - we really care about your privacy. Throughout the years we've funded the development of quite some widespread privacy enhancing technologies ourselves).
A practical point: we recommend to prepare longer answers offline, in case something goes wrong with your browser session. It is a light weight procedure, please don't wait until the last hour before the deadline before submitting - deadlines are hard.
Please select a call in the list of current calls below, please indicate the call topic you are responding to.
You can apply to compete in multiple calls in the same round if your project falls across different themes, but you will of course only be allocated funding once.
Thematic call
Contact information
witchescauldron@openworlds.info
Your name (max. 100 characters)
Hamish Campbell
Email address
witchescauldron@openworlds.info
Phone numbers
Organisation (max. 100 characters)
The OMN is a collective, building and hosting standards-based socio-political software.
Country
UK/ Mauritius/ EU Nomad
General project information
Working toward a #KISS and #4opens, grassroots web of trust. We focus on a human scale, outlining a human-understandable workflow used to develop apps for real world use.
We are agnostic with regard to the underlying technology and programming, as long as it is #4opens based.
The idea behind OGB came out of a practical need, from the experience of us fediverse "cats" outreaching #ActivityPub to the EU and from our long term work with on the ground horizontal protest movements.
We have become increasingly frustrated with digital holes in so many places that this code could fill; it's time to make it happen.
We are developing a "stakeholder" model that is built on the premise that grassroots, radical governance is an ideal fit for the fediverse, along with many "producer" networks.
The working practice comes from 30 years of on the ground building from 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness'.
The codebase is a distillation of the perspectives of a radical, grassroots, social technologist; a “permissionless” roll-out for social groups to form, govern and bare witness to themselves.
The OGB is based on Sortition, the KISS principle and #4Opens workflows.
Project name (max. 100 characters)
OGB (OpenWeb Governance Body)
Website / wiki
https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/
[Application Note]
Please be short and to the point in your answers; focus primarily on the what and how, not so much on the why. Add longer descriptions as attachments (see below). If English isn't your first language, don't worry - our reviewers don't care about spelling errors, only about great ideas. We apologise for the inconvenience of having to submit in English. On the up side, you can be as technical as you need to be (but you don't have to). Do stay concrete. Use plain text in your reply only, if you need any HTML to make your point please include this as attachment.
Abstract: Can you explain the whole project and its expected outcome(s).
As a socal coding project the #OGB is not a traditional top down fight for power like the #mainstreaming agenda. Rather, it is a bottom-up grassroots fight for /sharing/ power, as found in many of the 20th century social movements that acturly created the best of the current mainstream.
We facilitate the forming, communication and decision-making of communities, at all scales. The #OGB code does not impose a singular agenda, but rather provides tools to organise.
The #OGB is a seed - "There is such a thing as society" - we need to build our tools for this anti-"commonsense" statement.
Life and society are chaotic. We embrace the inherent messiness of human collaboration (particularly as scale increases), and build tools that facilitate communal processes, rather than attempt to impose order.
In protest camps the people who take decisions are the people who walk in from the street; we use sortition to bring this value to the #OGB.
A truly #openweb society is essential for the social change and challenges that we are facing in the era of #climatechaos.
The major advantage of "governance" within the fediverse, is that there is none.
Yet the fediverse is in need of "governance" if it is to become part of our #openweb based society. We are helping to redefine what it is to govern and be governed - it's #nothingnew, yet still to be achieved. We take our working practices from years of practical, lived experience.
The Fediverse comes from the "cats" of libertarianism and to a lesser extent anarchism without the (O). In this, we mustn't think how to fit into current working practices and current economics. Those who push "common sense" solutions to problems of "governance" within the fediverse are in fact a part of the problem. We are proposing a solution that has a chance of succeeding.
We aim to shape things such that to be "native" in the fediverse means to use #4opens code to build "society" up from the roots.
Have you been involved with projects or organisations relevant to this project before? And if so, can you tell us a bit about your contributions?
We have been actively working in the area where this project would be used. We've seen directly what works and what doesn't.
Hamish has 30 years experience in runnning grassroots social tech projects. He has been involved with UnderCurrents, VisionOnTV, London Boating, ... and has a firm grasp of what does and does not work in both social and technological forms.
Tom has 30 years of experience in development and project management, bridging the divide between the chaotic human aspects and the quantifiable tech.
Saunders is a permaculture designer/teacher working on grassroots social aid projects. He is also a sysadmin/programmer and has kept the OMN servers online for the last 6 years.
The project comes from our life times of lived experience of activist culture. We are coding an important/hidden part of our society. We as a team have been at the heart of organising these events for generations, back to my grandparents. We have been involved with social change groups from squats, protest camps, climate camps; to indymedia, Reclaim the Streets; Permaculture.
The team also has experience of working on UN and World Bank projects in West Africa and from this has completely moved to managing them through community/scrum, rather than formal methods.
All of our team have worked in social/technology for there careers. Currently we run 6 servers hosting public instances within the fediverse, including http://visionon.tv, grassroots journalism running for over ten years.
Requested support
Development and stage one rollout and testing. We will be looking for further funding to build stage two.
Requested Amount max amount (in Euro)
50K
Explain what the requested budget will be used for?
Payment will be handled via https://opencollective.com/open-media-network.
Over a period of 9 months - 1 year Hardware: Servers, Backup Human labour: Programming, Community/University outreach, training and support Travel: Outreach and training events (e.g. UK universities). Misc: Company upkeep
At the next stage of the funding application we will submit a more detailed budget.
It will be used to pay 4 people to work on the project at a fixed rate of ten thousand euros for 6-9 months work, invoiced at the end of specific milestones. The remaining ten thousand will be used for servers, expenses, outreach work and company upkeep.
New coder to be found - programming
we need a solid "activist" coder to widen the OMN collective, to build sustainability and keep up levels of ongoing support
Social outreach and testing/feedback; this is core to the coding. The project is developed as it is used.
Does the project have other funding sources, both past and present?
it comes from the grassroots, so no, but to make it real will take some resources hence the grant application
(If you want, you can in addition attach a budget at the bottom of the form)
Compare your own project with existing or historical efforts
The results of foundation funding too often has a bad effect on openweb project agendas. Let's briefly look at some projects. https://decidim.org follows an #NGO process much like https://www.loomio.org has; they formed a face-to-face process that imposed formal consensus in activism, which has always failed [why?]. Formal process is a BAD tool for "herding cats" in social challenge groups.
Both Loomio and Decidim came directly out of an encoding of the failure of formal consensus; Climate Camp is a great example of this.
Climate Camp started of flexible, open - with the introduction of formalised consensus it became ossified, with sub-optimal results. E.g. 200 people in the room, 10 geeks had rigid process of formal consensus that no one could grasp. Ultimately led to the agenda of the 10 being pushed through.
We build from actual producers/active members of a community; those who are already evidentially participating and doing something - thus there is a higher chance of producing a functional outcome.
We are similar to an un/-conference or to the do-ocracy of Noisebridge.
OGB is designed for chaotic governance.
A lack of community leads to money not being enough for a project to succeed in the long term - when the money runs dry, there is no community to uphold the work. Our project focusses on developing and supporting the community.
ActivityPub works. It was developed by a community and continues to be upheld by one. It is a rare example of a sensible standard.
NextCloud and XWiki ticked boxes to work with the ActivityPub community and standards - NextCloud no longer supports ActPub in recent releases, nor test it's application. A plugin for ActPub has been developed for XWiki but no one is actively testing or using it - we will.
These #process geeks have not changed, their projects are a bad fit for life and a terrible fit for the #fediverse or activism. They might work for some #NGO and more formal #coop organising.
Link for more info https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/Looking-at-existing-projects
What are significant technical challenges you expect to solve during the project, if any?
To fill an obvious hole in our set of openweb digital tools while not reproducing the mistakes of the past. We increase our chances of success by taking something that has worked for generations and turning it into #openweb code.
People challenges: We have to map messy human processes into code (which is better at representing more rigid structures). Our approach is therefore to map simpler behaviours and functions, while not imposing /how/ they may be utilised in the bigger picture. This allows for emergent behaviours to freely manifest, instead of trying (and failing) to define them. [^ This needs work - particularly I think I'm not quite right in how I describe the "imposing"]
An API that is open and modular, thus flexible - not too micro-focussed to do one overly specific thing only. ActivityPub is a good example.
Integrating into complex live systems. While ActivityPub has a standard, many implementations do not strictly follow it. Our awareness of this coupled with #KISS should help us here - implement only what is necessary as we need it, i.e. solve the /actual/ problem in front of us while being conscious that this can be a moving target.
Technological challenges: (D)DOS disruptions shall be handled with standard techniques. Access control is to be managed by OAuth2, with re-captchas during account creation.
Bad actors are mediated by the system itself. This is one aspect of where sortition shines.
Mis- and dis-information is the responsibilty of a "Security Group" (part of all Templates) - "Newbie's" are tagged as such to encourage others to be patient with them.
Generate output over input - prevent pollution via the wider ActPub community - OGB comments made directly on the Wiki pages, by active members, avoiding noise/heresay (comments on comments do not generate notifications).
Describe the ecosystem of the project, and how you will engage with relevant actors and promote the outcomes?
The ecosystem ultimately encompasses all scales of community, from e.g. a local neighbourhood, through districts and out to nations and global.
We start by engaging with subcultures of the fediverse and specifically activism, but rapidly move beyond this as the project UX and workflow matures to more mainstream "producer" groups.[Define producer more clearly] These communitites are predominantly reached via ...
Stage one rollout and testing will be for:
- the fediverse: predominantly online, run by technologists; those who should make the decisions are those who are running the instances followed by those utilising.
- a local street market: predominantly offline
- a community group working for bike use in Chiswick, London: predominantly offline, but whom communicate largely online.
The outcomes will be published publically via the instances themeselves, being OpenWeb Governance. Further the OGB project itself
Attachments
Attachments: add any additional information about the project that may help us to gain more insight into the proposed effort, for instance a more detailed task description, a justification of costs or relevant endorsements. Attachments should only contain background information, please make sure that the proposal without attachments is self-contained and concise. Don't waste too much time on this. Really.
Accepted formats for attachments are:
HTML, PDF, OpenDocument Format and plain text files.**
How may we handle your information
(If you haven't, please check our privacy policy).
When your project gets selected, we will legally need to retain your information for compliance purposes for at least seven years. Also, in case you are submitting to one of the NGI related funds, at that point we will need to share some information with our (not-for-profit) partner organisations in order so they may assist you with mentoring as well as complementary services e.g. accessibility, documentation, localisation, packaging, etc. By submitting a proposal you grant us permission to handle the data in the proposal in the manner described.
What should we do in the other case, e.g. when your project is not immediately selected?
I allow NLnet Foundation to keep the information I submit on record, should future funding opportunities arise
I want NLnet Foundation to erase all information should my project proposal not be granted.
Send me a copy of this application.