Before we share multiple significant updates and ways you can re-engage with the OpenCivics community in 2026, we want to share our new Theory of Change video (7 minutes) that summarizes the foundational thinking and approach behind OpenCivics.

This overview video for the movement is intended to be complimented by deeper dives into our philosophy, practice, and network (coming soon). We hope the video leaves you feeling inspired and aligned with the shared work ahead.

Please share it with someone you think needs to see it.

The Great Turning Underway

Across the planet, people are already building what comes next. In kitchens and community centers, on Discord servers and in watersheds, people are experimenting with new ways to coordinate, govern, and care for each other.

This work is often invisible. It happens in fragments, isolated peers that don’t know about each other, reinventing wheels and unnecessarily starting from scratch, patterns that never get shared.

Today’s civic fabric is thin, fragile, and centralized. We’ve outsourced responsibility to distant institutions, watched our commons get privatized, and seen trust unravel into polarization. But a different paradigm is emerging — one where civic life becomes more participatory, resilient, and vital through shifts in our values and everyday practices.

The OpenCivics Movement is emerging to change that. To support shifts from a thin, fragile, centralized ‘closed’ civic fabric to a vital, resilient, participatory ‘open’ civic fabric that’s fractal and practiced everywhere, every day. To create the conditions where open civic allies, innovators, organizers, and patrons can better find each other, build and learn together, and share what’s working.

OpenCivics’ development began in 2022 with the Network soft launched (live but not amplified) at the end of 2023. Over the course of the Network’s first year, we onboarded over 70 members and distributed several hundred thousand dollars in grant funding. As the Network grew, it became clear that we needed to more thoroughly define the core underlying design philosophy and theory of change we wanted to channel the collective efforts of the Network towards. We also knew that we needed a progressive protocolization plan to decenter ourselves as Stewards and support self-organization across the network. Through that process, we also discovered that we needed a Labs to advance the field of open civic innovation through strategic collaborations and open source knowledge creation.

At the end of 2024, we published our progressive protocolization plan and began working on the foundational building blocks for the Consortium and Labs. We paused membership applications under the pretense that this process would be relatively concise. It ended up taking about a year.

During this time we are happy to share that we have nurtured a thriving Labs and we’ve methodically developed the conceptual and functional foundations needed for the next phase of the Consortium’s collaborative work. Important groundwork, but still largely concept exploration and ideas on paper.

That’s ready to change now. We’re in the midst of crossing a threshold. What we refer to as phase one into phase two. The foundations are set, the infrastructure is live, and the network is ready to function as more than a vision.

Open civic innovation is becoming a living, community-led practice.

From Concept to Practice

When we launched OpenCivics, we knew a small stewardship team could spark something, but a movement that lasts has to be able to organize itself.

We’ve spent this past year building what that actually requires: not just ideas, but infrastructure. Not just philosophy, but pathways for participation. Not just a thesis, but the rituals and rhythms that let a distributed community coordinate, learn, and act together.

The scaffolding is in place. Now we need to bring it to life together.

Completing this transition requires more three steps:

1. Re-engage our community — Reconnect with members, welcome new ones, and activate the relationships that make a network more than a mailing list.

2. Start our new rhythms — Host assemblies, councils, and gatherings that create consistent opportunities to connect and collaborate.

3. Resource our efforts — Sufficiently fund the infrastructure, populate the knowledge commons, and build the capacity to sustain this work.

None of this happens without you. Here’s where we are and how to plug in.

What This Transition Into Phase 02 Means For You

OpenCivics is a community of practice and solidarity network, not another organization that takes up all your time.

1. The vast majority of your time and attention as you engage with OpenCivics stays on your own work — the projects, activities, and efforts you’re already engaged in. OpenCivics exists to support, connect, and resource your existing life’s work.

2. A smaller slice of your time engaged with OpenCivics goes toward connecting with peers, sharing what you’re learning, and finding collaborators.

3. And an even smaller slice, if and when it calls to you, goes toward evolving the field and helping the network run well.

The goal is that engaging here gives you energy and connection. If it starts feeling like another obligation draining your attention, we’re doing it wrong.

Step One: Re-Engage Our Community

A network is only as alive as the people participating in it. We’ve built infrastructure, but infrastructure without relationship is just empty scaffolding.

What we’re asking:

• Reconnect. If you’ve been on the periphery, now is the time to weave back in. Explore what’s new. Lean into what resonates. Share your own updates.

  → Subscribe to our Luma Calendar and Substack

• Update your membership. Help us know who you are and what you’re working on so we can connect you with the right people.

  → Resubmit membership form

• Make your work visible. Index your activities, peers, and resources so opportunities for collaboration can emerge.

  → Add to the commons

• Invite others. We’re ready to onboard new members. If you know someone who should be here, point them our way.

  → Invite someone to join

What we’ve developed to support this:

• WEBSITE — A redesigned website with clear entry points and the full story of what we’re building
  → opencivics.co

• WIKI — A wiki organized around our foundational documentation: thesis, concepts, framework, and network
  → wiki.opencivics.co

• PORTAL — A private workspace for Consortium members to coordinate, collaborate, and connect
  → portal.opencivics.co

• COMMONS — A living map of what’s happening in the field
  → commons.opencivics.co

• FORUM — A place to discuss Consortium proposals with clear posts and threads to guide the dialogue. Available to consortium members (requires invite).

  → forum.opencivics.co

• BROADCAST — Our primary broadcast channel for sharing network updates, case studies, civic innovator spotlights, reports, and notes from the field.

  → broadcast.opencivics.co

Step Two: Start Our New Rhythms

Connection doesn’t happen by accident. It requires consistent, reliable spaces where people can show up, find each other, and build trust over time.

We heard clearly that members want this. So we built the scaffolding to more effectively support it.

The core rhythms we’re launching:

• Bi-weekly Network Assemblies — Open to all network members. Designed for connection, peer learning, & finding collaborators. It’s where we amplify you and your efforts through open civic innovator sessions and open space.

• Monthly Delegate Council, Governance Sessions & Quarterly Advisor Council — For those going deeper into network coordination.

• Quarterly Strategy Reviews — Transparent check-ins on where we’re headed.

• Annual Summit — A gathering to share critical work across the field.

What we’re asking:

• Attend an Assembly. They are every two weeks, rotating for timezone. Put it on your calendar. Even if you just listen, your presence matters.

• Bring something to share. A question you’re sitting with. A project you’re working on. A pattern you’ve noticed. These gatherings are peer-driven.

• Commit to consistency. The magic happens when people keep showing up. Relationships deepen. Collaboration emerges.

What to do:

→ Subscribe to Calendar
→ Join Community on Telegram

Step Three: Resource Our Efforts

The developmental work of the past two years has been almost entirely volunteer. Patricia and Benjamin have been building towards this vision pro bono while sustaining themselves through external projects, and more recently, Labs consulting work. This model is not sustainable, and it limits what’s possible. We’ve been waiting until our asks and offers are clear, to have demonstrated the value of the ecosystem, and established mechanisms to support consistent flow funding.

As of today, OpenCivics has helped to distribute over $360,000 USD in community-led grants from over a thousand donors. We have convened a network of over 190 open civic allies, innovators, organizers, and patrons and that represent over 200 organizations. We’ve hosted gatherings and catalyzed collaborations across three continents.

But for this movement to fully mature, it needs to be supported by sufficient resource flows. That means securing initial financial funding, but it also means populating the knowledge commons with the resources and directories that make open civic innovation reproducible, to demonstrate possibility in action and further support this emerging field by making the value of our work more visible.

Funding Pathways

• Donate to OpenCivics Consortium to support Network stewardship, operations and developmental activities → Make a Donation

• Engage with OpenCivics Labs in a direct collaborative engagement → Book a Call

• Partner with OpenCivics Fund to direct flow funding to Network activities and resources → Book a Call

Why Funding This Work Matters

With your support, OpenCivics is set to grow into a vital network capable of responding to the rising crises of our moment by:

• Coordinating the research, documentation and sharing of critical and urgently needed open protocols for community-led resilience and local organizing.

• Supporting facilitation, templates and coordination for distributed, community-led colabs, swarms of self-organized activity to meet real local needs.

• Providing compensation for Network Stewards, Delegates, and Contributors to provide network coordination and infrastructure support to the movement.

• Hosting digital and physical convenings to strengthen the open civic innovation domain and contribute towards shared efforts in bioregional organizing, local resilience, and community-led infrastructure design.

What we’ve built to support this:

• Fiscal Sponsorship from Buckminster Fuller Institute — Allowing us to receive tax deductible donations today to sustain our work coordinating systems-scale innovation.

• Updated Consortium Constitution & Participation Pathways — Clearer membership roles from Ally → Citizen → Contributor → Delegate → Steward, plus Partner roles for organizations and Advisor roles for individuals.

• OpenCivics Labs — Our cooperatively-owned consulting guild, which has been practicing open civic innovation with partners like Buckminster Fuller Institute, Indigenous Commons, Center for Ethical Land Transition, and Regen Network.

• New Theory of Change Series — Content walking through how the philosophy, practice, and community compose the movement (coming soon).

What We Learned Through Labs

Over the past year, OpenCivics Labs served as our applied R&D environment. We didn’t just theorize about open civic innovation — we practiced it, working with partners like Buckminster Fuller Institute, Indigenous Commons, Center for Ethical Land Transition, and Regen Network.

Those collaborations let us test our methodology in real contexts.

Labs continues as a cooperatively-owned consulting guild for partners who want support designing networks, governance systems, or coordination infrastructure.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be beginning to public open source resources in the commons and publish case studies from nearly a dozen experiments in the field.

The Invitation

The movement is coming alive. But a movement isn’t something that happens to you, but through you. Here’s how to participate in this moment of transition.

Re-engage:

• Explore the Website and Wiki

• Visit the Member Portal

• Update your membership

• Index your activities by posting them on Telegram

Show up:

• Come to a Network Assembly

• Join the conversation on Telegram

Resource the work:

• Donate to support network infrastructure

• Contribute to the Knowledge Commons

• Apply as a Partner to fund something together

• Talk to OpenCivics Labs about building something together

Spread the word:

• Invite someone who should be in the Network

• Share our Theory of Change video

What’s Next

The foundations are set. Now we’re bringing them to life together.

We’ll keep you posted through regular updates. And we want to hear from you, what’s working, what’s confusing, what you need.

We’re glad you’re still with us on this journey after all these years of building toward this moment, a moment when the world needs us to work together more than ever. The path ahead won’t be easy as we respond to the long disaster of collapsing systems and rising authoritarianism, but it will be possible because we’re together.

In Us We Trust,
Patricia & Benjamin, OpenCivics Stewards

The Unraveling and the Emergence

Something’s shifting. You can feel it if you’re paying attention.

The old systems — the ones we’ve depended on for decades — are straining under their own contradictions. Institutions that once felt permanent are revealing themselves as brittle, disconnected from the lived realities of the people they claim to serve. Meanwhile, at the edges, something else is taking root: experiments in community-led support, neighbors organizing mutual aid networks, bioregional experiments in self-governance finding their footing, local economies reconnecting producers with communities, people designing new civc systems of community care, because the old ones have stopped working.

This isn’t collapse. It’s emergence. The two happening simultaneously.

The future of civilization doesn’t depend on better technology or smarter policy from above. It depends on whether communities can recover — or rediscover — their capacity to coordinate, govern, and care for themselves. The tools matter, but only insofar as they strengthen relationships rather than replace them. Infrastructure means nothing if it doesn’t serve real people in real places doing the patient work of sustaining life together.

This is why we’re helping steward the Localism Fund — a new experiment that weaves together our commitment to nurturing the field of open civic innovation with Ethereum’s coordination infrastructure to support place-based organizing at scale.

What We’re Building

The Localism Fund launched with $155,000 USD in initial funding from our partners Celo Public Goods, Gitcoin, Ma Earth, and Ethereum Everywhere to support local hubs, networks, and place-based groups worldwide. But this isn’t another grant-making program where distant funders decide what communities need. It’s an experiment in subsidiarity — a design principle that says decisions should sit at the most local level capable of making them well. We’re honored to be working with Regen Coordination and a network of expert peers to bring this vision to fruition.

Two pathways are open now:

🌿 Local Grant Programs | Round 01

Design and run your own local funding round rooted in political, economic, cultural, or ecological localism.

Matching Pool: $125,000 USD

Apply: localism.fund/round-01

Localism Fund Expert Network

Join as a peer-validated expert in grant-making, Web3 coordination, or localism. Evaluate, mentor, advise.

Compensation: $5,500 USD + 10,000 CELO

Apply: localism.fund/expert-network

Why Localism Matters

For generations, we’ve watched decision-making authority concentrate in institutions increasingly detached from place. The problems we face — democratic fragility, economic brittleness, cultural erosion, ecological decline — all manifest locally. They’re experienced in watersheds, neighborhoods, bioregions. In the commons that sustain us.

Localism is the simple recognition that those closest to a challenge are usually best positioned to solve it. It’s about rooting governance, economic activity, and cultural practice in relationship to place and to each other.

This takes different forms depending on context:

Political localism looks like participatory budgeting, neighborhood assemblies, municipal innovation — decentralizing authority to the people living with the consequences of decisions.

Economic localism means building local ownership through cooperatives, community currencies, shorter supply chains — keeping value circulating where it’s generated rather than extracting it elsewhere.

Cultural localism is strengthening the stories, heritage, and practices that root people in place — the foundation of resilience when everything else becomes uncertain.

Ecological localism means stewarding the watersheds, forests, and soil systems that actually sustain life — governance grounded in bioregional reality rather than arbitrary political boundaries.

Ethereum localism uses blockchain-based tools — payments, attestations, governance mechanisms, open data — to help communities coordinate without centralized middlemen extracting value from every interaction.

These aren’t separate categories. They’re overlapping expressions of the same core principle: communities need the capacity to organize themselves adaptively across changing circumstances. This is what civic resilience actually looks like.

How It Works: Polycentric by Design

The Localism Fund operates as a learning network rather than a traditional funder. We’re building what could be called a “polycentric architecture” — a system where global resources meet local knowledge through iterative cycles, and everyone gets smarter together.

Think of it as two flows moving in opposite directions:

Resources flow down:

Capital, tools, frameworks, and mentorship move from people with domain expertise → the Fund → regional networks → local hubs → community activities on the ground.

Learning flows up:

Stories, impact data, attestations, and hard-won wisdom flow back, informing future rounds and helping the whole system adapt.

The result:

A dynamic ecosystem where what works spreads, credible hubs attract more support, and the network evolves based on what communities actually need rather than what distant funders think they need.

Here’s the practical piece: local hubs receive matching funds to run their own grant programs. They decide priorities, select projects, distribute resources, and report back on what happened. We provide matching capital to amplify their fundraising, expert mentorship to strengthen program design, coordination infrastructure for transparency, and network learning so insights travel across contexts.

This is what subsidiarity means in practice — governance sitting at the most local level capable of identifying real challenges and organizing local collective action, supported by shared scaffolding that helps coordinate across scales without imposing uniformity.

Who’s Involved: Weaving Partners Together

The Fund itself is an experiment in collaborative stewardship. Co-stewarded by Patricia Parkinson and Benjamin Life from OpenCivics and Monty Merlin Bryant from Regen Coordination and Celo Public Goods, our joint effort is already weaving together a range of aligned partners, each bringing different capacities:

Stewardship:

OpenCivics brings civic innovation and network coordination. Regen Coordination brings regenerative finance strategy and ecosystem weaving.

Funding:

Gitcoin, Celo Public Goods, Ma Earth, and Ethereum Foundation / Ethereum Everywhere are backing this experiment.

Infrastructure Support:

Karma GAP handles application management. TrustGraph / WAVS provides peer attestation and decentralized reputation.

Round 01: Funding Local Funding

Our first round, Local Grant Programs, funds something unusual: we’re not funding individual projects. We’re funding locally-led funding programs — giving communities the capacity to run their own grant rounds using Ethereum coordination tools.

Who should apply:

Local hubs, chapters, coalitions, bioregional nodes ready to launch a grant round in early 2026.

What we’re looking for:

Programs that strengthen community coordination — political, economic, cultural, or ecological — while piloting practical uses of blockchain tools for governance, resource flows, and transparent decision-making.

Grant range:

$5,000–$20,000 per program (matched)

Total pool:

$125,000 USD

More details: localism.fund/round-01

Building Trust Through Peer Recognition

Here’s a problem that plagues traditional grant-making: evaluation happens behind closed doors, by people often disconnected from the communities and tools they’re assessing. Trust becomes opaque. Credibility becomes impossible to verify.

The Localism Fund Expert Network takes a different approach. We’re seeding a peer-attested network of practitioners with lived experience in localism, Web3 coordination, and community-led grant-making.

Experts contribute by:

• Evaluating applications using a shared rubric developed transparently

• Mentoring local hubs through program design and operations

• Providing feedback on the tools we’re using — making them better for everyone

Instead of credentials issued by distant authorities, experts vouch for each other through on-chain attestations using TrustGraph — a governance tool that makes trust more visible and verifiable. As peers attest to each other’s contributions, reputation grows dynamically using an algorithm similar to how Google’s PageRank works. Trust becomes living, adaptive, grounded in real collaboration rather than bureaucratic gatekeeping. Calculating TrustScores using on-chain attestation data is made possible through verified off-chain computation provided by WAVS.

Participation is flexible — from light evaluation work to deeper mentorship — with compensation ranging from $200–$1,200 USD plus CELO rewards and on-chain recognition.

This is what it looks like to build open civic systems rooted in peer relationships and transparent reputation rather than opaque hierarchies.

The Longer Arc: Cultivating Open Civic Renaissance

We talk sometimes about fostering an open civic renaissance — a renewal of the cultural capacity that allows communities to thrive together. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s about rediscovering ancient practices of mutual care and reciprocity while wielding new coordination tools that amplify, rather than replace, local agency.

The Localism Fund is one experiment in what this looks like: resources flowing through trusted networks to support local action, with learning flowing back to inform the next cycle.

Over time, we’re cultivating an ecosystem where:

- Local hubs operate with genuine autonomy, supported by shared infrastructure rather than controlled by it.

- Expert networks provide credible evaluation grounded in peer trust and transparent contribution rather than opaque authority.

- Open-source tools let communities coordinate without middlemen capturing value from every transaction.

- Knowledge commons ensure patterns that work can travel and adapt across different contexts.

- Bioregional coordination strengthens as effective models replicate and connect across places.

This is the work of civilizational renewal — not through grand transformation from above, but through patient cultivation of adaptive, self-organizing systems capable of sustaining life together as circumstances change.

Your Role in This

Whether you’re organizing community resilience where you live, designing new coordination tools, or looking to resource regenerative systems — there’s a place for you in this work.

For local organizers:

Run your own community-led funding round connecting local needs with blockchain coordination tools.

→ localism.fund

For practitioners:

Join the Expert Network to evaluate, mentor, and earn recognition for contributing to this movement.

→ localism.fund/expert-network

For partners:

Help us launch new rounds and extend this architecture to more regions and contexts.

For everyone:

Join the conversation, ask questions, help refine these experiments in place-based coordination.

💬 Community: t.me/localismfund

✉️ Contact: support@localism.fund

The future we need won’t emerge from centralized powers or abstract promises. It will grow from communities rediscovering their capacity to coordinate, care for each other, and govern themselves. This is scaffolding for that emergence.

Let’s build it together. 🌱

A pattern, a paradox, a protocol, a provocation, Ethereum Localism is going cosmo-local. Born in the misty urban landscape of the city of Roses and Bridges, the General Forum on Ethereum Localism (GFEL) was never a single event but rather an ongoing decentralized inquiry into the application of web3 tech in right relationship with local networks of mutual aid, solidarity, and communal autonomy.

Now, the living inquiry of Ethereum Localism is spreading, finding a home in the sweeping mountain vistas and protopian communities of Boulder, CO. While disputes over who has the better coffee, beer, and cannabis may never be resolved, the Ethereum Localists of Boulder and Portland are united in their devotion to open collaborative spaces in which the visions of open mutualism might be actualized.

As the crypto world assembles for ETH Denver, we gather a much smaller and more humble assembly at the foot of the mighty flat irons in Boulder to provide a counter narrative to those of mainstream crypto. We deserve a world based on consent, solidarity, and mutuality, and we believe web3 technology can serve those ends, if we choose to organize ourselves cosmo-locally and make it so.

This GFEL explores the theme “Local Flows : Global Currents”, navigating the interplay between local resilience and global interdependence. As the world faces escalating uncertainty and chaos, from climate crises and extreme weather to economic instability and political polarization, our ability to build resilient systems at the local level has never been more critical. At the heart of this GFEL’s discussions will be local currencies, regenerative economies, bioregional governance and financing, community public goods funding, local data ownership, coordination platforms, water and land stewardship, and disaster preparedness—the tools and capacities that empower communities to thrive amidst global instability. This is an invitation to examine how the technologies of web3 can support local flows of trust, value, culture and resources while fostering global solidarity and shared responsibility.

This event is open to local activists and organizers as well as web3 builders and leaders who share a passion for civic technology, public goods, community organizing, and all other forms of mutual aid and localism.

Apply To Attend

Who Should Attend?

GFEL is for those who have wandered through the world of crypto, longing for conversations that prioritize systems change and community organizing over “pump and dump” schemes. It’s for local organizers who crave discussions about technology that are free from techno-utopian posturing and packed with grounded, practical solutions.

This is a gathering for those who believe in the potential of web3 technologies to serve ideals of consent, solidarity, and mutuality—tools for building thriving local ecosystems, not just extracting value from them.

What to Expect

GFEL spans Friday, February 21, through Sunday, February 23, with optional post-conference field trips and co-working opportunities through February 26. This gathering will feature:

• Opening Ceremony and Keynote Speakers who will inspire us to think beyond the hype of crypto toward its potential for systemic change.

• Unconference Open Spaces, where attendees set the agenda, creating room for organic conversations and collaborations.

• Cosmo Local — A Local Art & Action Showcase: a lively celebration of local artists, organizers, and innovators, featuring lightning talks, live participatory budgeting grants, DJs, and performances from Boulder’s vibrant creative community.

But GFEL isn’t just about what happens inside the conference space. On Sunday, February 23, we’ll take our ideas into the field with Mycelial Field Trips to local initiatives like the Niwot Homestead, Yellow Barn Farm, and Boulder Food Rescue. These explorations will connect the values of cosmo-localism with the tangible work of regenerative localism.

For those who want to linger, the week following the forum will include opportunities to co-work at Boulder’s RegenHub ahead of ETH Denver, share meals at community potlucks, and dive deeper into the ideas and connections sparked during the forum.

The Flow of Events

Friday, February 21:

• Opening Ceremony: Vision-setting with dynamic speakers

• Unconference Open Space: Set the agenda for collaborative sessions

• Kick-Off Party: Celebrate the start of the forum with an evening of creativity and community action, live participatory budgeting, lightning talks, and performances

Saturday, February 22:

• Keynote Talks: Final speaker sessions to provoke thought and inspire action

• Unconference Sessions: Dive deep into participant-led topics

Sunday, February 23:

• Integration Sessions: Tie it all together in final discussions

• Mycelial Field Trips: Explore Boulder’s regenerative initiatives

February 24–26 (Optional):

• Field Trips: Visit innovative local projects like Yellow Barn Farm and Elk Run

• Co-Working: Connect with others at Boulder’s RegenHub

• Community Potlucks: Share meals, ideas, and dreams

Why GFEL?

GFEL is about more than web3—it’s about weaving together the values of Ethereum Localism with the deep wisdom of grassroots organizing and the power of local communities. This forum is for anyone who believes in the potential of cosmo-local collaboration, where ideas and resources flow freely across global networks but are grounded in local action.

We come together not just to talk but to imagine and build. GFEL is an invitation to join a community that cares about crafting open protocols that support thriving ecosystems of care and creativity.

Practical Details

• Cost: $100 USD / 100 DAI (scholarships available)

• Chain: Optimism

• Tickets: Complete this info form to receive a ticket purchase code. Once you’ve been approved and purchased your ticket, you’ll receive a follow-up email with further event details.

We aim to make GFEL accessible to all. If you or your organization are interested in providing sponsorships for participants who aren’t able to cover their own core expenses, please reach out to benjamin@opencivics.co. Various sponsorship tiers are available for aligned brands and organizations. We aim to make this event free for all local community organizers.

GFEL isn’t just a forum—it’s a movement.

Join us in Boulder, February 21–23, to co-create the next chapter in the story of Ethereum Localism.

👉 Apply for your tickets today

Scholarships are available—reach out to us if you need support.

GFEL Boulder is being organized as an Initiative within the OpenCivics Consortium, in partnership with the RegenHub.

Together, let’s imagine, create, and act toward a more beautiful, just, and thriving world.

Key Inquiries for GFEL Boulder 2025: Local Flows and Global Currents

As GFEL 2025 unfolds under the theme “Local Flows and Global Currents,” we aim to catalyze new explorations and deepen ongoing conversations at the intersection of Ethereum Localism, regenerative systems, and web3 technologies. Here are some of the open questions and provocative inquiries we’ll tackle together:

1. Mapping and Enabling Local Resource Flows

• What do local resource flows look like in practice within resilient and thriving communities?

• How can we study and map local flows of value, trust, and resources in a way that supports actionable insights?

• What are the onchain mechanisms that local currencies can use to model successful resource flows found in grassroots organizations, cooperatives, and mutual aid networks?

• What mechanisms are missing or underdeveloped in current web3 tooling to support local economies effectively?

• How can we integrate diverse forms of capital (social, ecological, cultural, and financial) into the design of local currencies and regenerative economies?

• What incentives could drive communities to actively map and share their resource flows while respecting privacy and autonomy?

2. Governance: DAO-to-DAO Coordination and Ecosystem Development

• What does DAO-to-DAO coordination look like when applied to local and global coalitions?

• What mechanisms currently exist for DAO collaboration, and where are the gaps?

• How might a DAO of DAOs—a networked ecosystem of autonomous but aligned organizations—function in practice?

• What tools and frameworks are needed to support decentralized coordination at scale, and how can we collectively develop them?

• How do we experiment with and test these new organizational models while ensuring they remain accessible to grassroots movements?

3. The Interplay of Local and Global

• How can local currencies and web3 tools integrate into global cosmo-local networks without compromising local autonomy?

• What are the trade-offs between local sovereignty and global scalability in cosmo-local systems?

• How can resource flows between local communities be designed to support mutual resilience rather than extractive competition?

• How do we measure and account for the impact of cosmo-local collaborations on ecological and social systems?

4. Regeneration and Water as a Core Resource

• What lessons can be learned from traditional and modern water stewardship practices to inform the design of local resource flows?

• How can web3 technologies contribute to regenerative water and land management, ensuring equitable and sustainable access to this vital resource?

• What role could community currencies play in incentivizing regenerative practices related to water and other commons?

5. Experimentation and Scaling Impact

• How do we incentivize experimentation within local communities while minimizing risk?

• What metrics should we use to evaluate success in experiments that integrate web3 tools into local systems?

• How can open-source learnings from these experiments be shared across communities to accelerate global adoption?

6. Diverse Stakeholder Involvement

• How can we bridge the gap between local organizers and web3 technologists to co-create meaningful tools?

• What frameworks ensure participatory governance that includes historically excluded voices in both local and global decision-making?

• How can we ensure knowledge and technology sharing remains reciprocal and non-extractive in cosmo-local collaborations?

These questions reflect the high potential value of converging localism and web3 innovation. By shining a light on these challenges and collaborating to address them, GFEL Boulder 2025 can catalyze solutions that resonate far beyond our gathering. Let’s dive into these inquiries together, and co-create a world where local flows thrive amidst global currents.

Join Us!

We’re thrilled to announce OpenCivics' partnership with the BioFi Pathfinders Round, part of Gitcoin’s next evolution of community-based quadratic funding grants! This collaboration is more than a funding opportunity; it's a convening of some of the most groundbreaking bioregional initiatives working together to establish place-based financial infrastructure that puts power back in the hands of communities.

The BioFi Pathfinders Round is designed to support mature Bioregional Organizing Teams —the courageous community-led teams building financial ecosystems that are as unique as the landscapes they serve. Together with the BioFi Project, the Design School for Regenerating Earth, Regen Coordination, and Gitcoin, we’re creating space for these projects to redefine how regenerative economies can flourish by fostering authentic relationships between people and place.

Donate with PayPal

Donate with Crypto

Why This Matters

As an invite-only round, the BioFi Pathfinders are a select group of bioregional organizers who are laying the foundation for resilient, decentralized economies. These teams come from diverse ecosystems but share a common goal: to create adaptive, cooperative finance systems that respond to local needs and enable ecological regeneration. From October 23 to November 6, your donations can directly influence the reach and impact of these visionary projects, thanks to Gitcoin’s Quadratic Funding model. With each contribution, no matter the size, community support for these projects grows exponentially, ensuring that the projects with the widest backing gain the resources they need to thrive.

A Closer Look at the Round

The BioFi Project team has curated this round with projects that embody the principles of self-determination, regeneration, and mutual care. Each project is creating new financial pathways and establishing economic ecosystems designed to enable communities to steward their resources sustainably—realigning finance with nature and community. Even if you’re not able to donate, you’re strongly encouraged to read about the incredible projects in the round to meet the folks doing this cutting edge work and get inspired by how you might be able to do similar initiatives in your own bioregion.

Explore the projects here: Gitcoin Grants Explorer.

Join Us

Your support is an investment in the future of decentralized, resilient communities. We invite you to join us in fostering this new chapter for Bioregional Finance by contributing to the BioFi Pathfinders Round. By standing with us, you’re helping build a thriving world where local economies and ecologies flourish, grounded in shared commitments to regeneration and resilience.

Thank you for being part of this movement. Together, we’re creating systems that enable real, enduring change.

In solidarity,

Benjamin Life

Co-Founder, OpenCivics

💸 Donations are now open until August 21st!

38,000 USDC Total Matching Funds Available

Important Links:

• Hear from our grantees in our Round Showcase, Tuesday, August 13th

• Donate with crypto currency on Arbitrum.

• Learn about how to donate with crypto currency.

• Experiment with PayPal donations through our friends at viaPrize.

Your donations will unlock matching funds for 16 incredible research initiatives exploring key domains of inquiry that will serve community organizers and other civic innovators. Get to know our grantees below and make your donations before August 21st to express your preferences for which grantees you want to receive more matching funds

Meet Our Grantees

Governance in Context with Knowledge Organization Infrastructure (KOI)

Donate | Website

Description:

Traditional top-down data management systems have provided firms with significant advantages, but fall short in addressing the dynamic nature of knowledge within non-hierarchical groups, including DAOs. Such organizations need to enact collective governance over knowledge. In addition, existing approaches do not enable effective knowledge-sharing between groups, which is essential for collectives seeking to address shared problems, expand their networks or make use of an adjacent community’s expertise.

The KOI project is a Metagov initiative in collaboration with Block.Science and aims to reimagine knowledge management by developing and implementing an advanced system using Reference Identifiers (RIDs) within the graph-based KOI (Knowledge Organization Infrastructure)architecture developed by our partner, BlockScience. This initiative will enhance the ways in which collectives manage, share, and build upon their knowledge, fostering more effective and cohesive collaboration.

Coh3rence

Donate | Website

Description:

Coh3rence is an organization dedicated to fostering inclusive decision-making, conflict transformation, and holistic well-being within decentralized organizations, particularly DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and Web3 communities. It builds on the principles of Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs) to create environments where personal growth and collective success go hand in hand.

Stephen Reid: Technological Metamodernism

Donate | Website

Description:

This application is for research contributing to a Technological Metamodernism course in September 2024, which will invite participants to adopt a metamodern mindset - embracing both/and thinking, an awareness of allergies and a focus on reconstruction - as we explore tech's leading edges. How might metamodernism inform the development of AI, DAOs and transhumanism? Can it help us to bridge tech with the realms of nature, art and spirituality? What new and ancient narratives and mythologies might we call on to cultivate a metamodern relationship to technology and its role in our individual and collective evolution?

Systematizing the Status of Commons Protocols for Web3 Self-Infrastructure: A collaboration proposal by the P2P Foundation

Donate | Website

Description:

The P2P Foundation is a network of researcher into the impact of peer to peer technologies and commons-based infrastructures on all areas of human society, and with a recent focus on Web3 as a global infrastructure for mutual coordination.

It operates a frequently used wiki at http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net with 25k items related to such practices, observing and recording practices.

Our focus is on observation, documentation and analysis, which means that after intensive collection of the documentation, we also regularly produce synthetic reports (link to publications here). Domains are organized in sections, using mediawiki software, whereby section pages are used as introduction to the complexity of the domain, and each section represents its own encyclopedia.

RnDAO - empowering humane collaboration

Donate | Website

Description:

RnDAO is an innovation DAO, with a mission to empower humane collaboration.

We deliver research and build collaboration technology ventures such as organizational tools, community tools, DAO operations and governance tools.

Ethereal Forest's Open Protocol Research Group

Donate | Website

Description:

The Open Protocol Research Group is the research contingent of Ethereal Forest, consisting of Macks Wolf, Exeunt and Ven Gist. We work to identify analogue-world parallels to the decentralized web, including p2p style social coordination and open protocols, in order to develop pathways to formalization (i.e., scalability and reproducibility) beyond institutional enclosure.

Our work involves two elements: a) ethnographic research by way of interviews, on the ground encounters with communities and nonstandard urban systems, and explorations of the historical and conceptual archive, b) the development of practical concepts meant to enable alliances between the extitutional web and what we have called the urban protocol underground.

Catalyzing Bioregional Innovation

Donate | Website

Description:

Bioregions—areas defined by natural boundaries rather than political ones—offer a holistic and sustainable framework that aligns human activities with the natural systems that sustain us. As we face unprecedented global challenges, building our capabilities in bioregional organizing has become crucial for creating resilient, sustainable communities.

This research initiative aims to support and accelerate this growing movement. By bringing together diverse networks of practitioners, documenting successful practices, and identifying critical gaps, we seek to boost the adoption of bioregional approaches across communities, economies, and ecosystems. Our goal goes beyond documenting best practices—we aim to pinpoint critical needs and opportunities that can guide ongoing research and development in this field.

Impact Reporting Interoperability

Donate | Website

Description:

The goal of this proposal is to facilitate coherence and interoperability among civic actors, cosmo-local networks, and other agents by aligning impact reporting tools and frameworks.

MycoFi for Municipal Resilience

Donate | Website

Description:

The question isn't if crises will strike, but when—and most critically, what is our collective response in the face of the challenges posed by the situation. In this era of unprecedented challenges, cities stand on the front lines of climate change, social upheaval, and economic instability. Yet too many remain unprepared for shocks, even in the wake of Covid-19.

Our communities remain vulnerable thanks to their dependence on fragile global supply chains, ongoing wealth extraction, and a deeply eroded social fabric. In the face of these and other mounting threats, these vulnerabilities are clearly a ticking time bomb.

MycoFi is about redesigning our economies based on the design principles we observe in nature. This project is about continuing to build on this as a practical discipline.

The Embodied Governance Playbook

Donate | Website

Description:

The Embodied Governance Project is conducting open research towards a suite of collaborative techniques for managing commons infrastructures using embodied collective-sensing methodologies.

Cosmo-local communities, comprising technologists and Earth stewards from diverse backgrounds, are experimenting with socio-economic changes that require a body capable and ready to respond to the complexity in which it is immersed.

The new systems we are building must include beauty, love and emotional depth as inputs, even if they are not quantifiable. Without these, the systems will continue to optimize for profit and growth, as these inputs are more easily measured.

VoiceDeck: A Marketplace for Journalism Impact Certificates

Donate | Website

Description:

Our goal is researching a specific question: are impact certificates tax deductible?

The IRS rules are no quid pro quo contribution - so donating to wikipedia is fine, but purchasing their mug or any merch bears tax

If donors get impact certificates in exchange for their contributions, is it quid pro quo?

Sideways Ostrom5

Donate | Website

Description:

Ostrom5 is a mediation, remediation, and reporting organization that makes it easy for anyone in a network of organizations to have their issues addressed. It is designed for organizations within Web3, open source, climate, and social activism groups to resolve issues based on two of Elinor Ostrom’s eight principles for governing the commons:

• Principle 5. Sanctions for those who abuse the commons should be graduated.

• Principle 6. Conflict resolution should be easily accessible.

LexClinic [alpha-to-beta]

Donate | Website

Description:

DAO Coalition has developed what we hope can be a basic civics stack by creating modules to connect Hats Protocol with Snapshot, Passport and Unlock Protocol. We would like to do research on this stack as well as the consent innovations we have been doing on Hats mentioned in our project's description. We are helping startup the Journal of Legal Engineering and hope to publish this research there.

Distributed Governance Score Framework: DAO Index

Donate | Website

Description:

The Distributed Governance Score Framework (DGSF) project is developing an open and participatory framework to re-define how organizations assess their alignment with Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). At the heart of the DGSF project lies our tool, the DAO Index.

Flow State (Streaming Quadratic Funding)

Donate | Website

Description:

Flow State is a digital coop and impact funding platform that makes public good contributions more sustainable.

Bonding Curve Research Group (BCRG) Donate | Website

Description:

Our mission is to drive forward the research, development, education, and application of Bonding Curves in their various forms. This research group will provide chain agnostic research, development, education, and application of Bonding Curves in their various forms. This R&D will attract new talent and interest in the field of Token Engineering and to other blockchain ecosystems. Additionally, it will support building a common understanding and language around bonding curves and their applications to DAOs, businesses, finance, and economics.

Conclusion

We’re honored and excited to have convened such an incredible set of initiatives that we feel are creating immense value for the commons. We hope you will donate and share this grant round with your friends. Unlike previous rounds, anyone can make a PayPal donation using an experimental new tool from our friends at viaPrize. This method is experimental, may contain bugs, and includes a small transaction fee as well as a 5% platform fee, but we feel excited to offer PayPal as way to include more donors than previous rounds.

We hope you’ll donate today!

Sincerely,

Benjamin & Spencer

OpenCivics Collaborative Research Round Operators

Subscribe now

📝 Applications are open 07/24 - 08/06

💸 Donations are open 08/07 - 08/21

💰 42,000 USDC in matching funds available!

💳 Credit card payments experiment on viaPrize

The OpenCivics Collaborative Research Round is designed to foster collaboration among researchers and civic innovators to produce open source research & knowledge production that serves community organizers to access the power of web3 and civic innovation.

Projects are required to submit as a team or pod which offers an opportunity to experiment with on-chain collaboration and the co-governance of open-source civic engagement research. We’re specifically looking for research initiatives that are exploring the following areas of focus:

• Impact and contribution measurement, reporting, and valuation

• Commons governance, self-organization, and decision-making

• Collaborative knowledge management, learning, and sensemaking

• Open protocols, community templates, and coordination infrastructure

• Community currencies, cooperatives, and alternative economics

• Decentralized project management, roles, and certifications

• Resource allocation, funding mechanisms, and funding sources

Collaboration and Showcase

A key aspect of this research round is the emphasis on collaboration. Participants must agree to coordinate and collaborate with other grantees during and after the research round. This collaborative effort will enable the sharing of knowledge, resources, and playbooks designed to serve local civic engagement. The culmination of this collaboration will be the Grantee Impact Showcase, where all grantees will present their research findings, highlighting the collective achievements and insights gained through their cooperative efforts.

Funding and Governance

Grant applications must direct funds to multi-signature wallets. If you’re interested in applying and need help getting one set up, please reach out to us on Telegram.

Projects must also specify the collaborative mechanism they will use to govern, evaluate, and compensate participant contributions. This ensures transparency and accountability in the management of funds and contributions.

Milestones & Reporting

Projects must outline reasonable and verifiable milestones for low, medium, and large funding outcomes. These milestones will help track progress and ensure that projects remain on course to achieve their goals. OpenCivics is proud to be providing leadership among the round operators of all the Gitcoin Community Rounds to expand and improve the supporting infrastructures for grantees to report on their impact.

Implementing Learnings From Last Round

We’re continuing to iterate based on insights from our last round, including a smaller matching cap (15%) and exploring solutions for processing credit card donations. While our previous rounds limited the number of grantees to a specific number, this round will admit all eligible projects to compete for funding. We’re committed to continued learning and development in each round, perpetually refining our capacity to deploy and improve upon novel mechanisms for public goods funding.

The Purpose Of The Round

This round extends OpenCivics’ mission to empower communities with web3 coordination tools for civic engagement and collective action. The research developed through this round will be shared as a public good, providing educational resources and foundational explorations that support civic innovators and local community organizers.

This applied research will help communities self-organize and will broaden the scope of how web3 tools can be leveraged across the civics and community organizing design space. Documented case studies, curricula, and research will help communities coordinate to meet their own needs and transform their local governance and economies.

We look forward to reading your applications and sharing our collective research in the coming days, weeks, and months.

Apply Now!

In Us We Trust,

OpenCivics Stewards

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.

  • Donate: go.opencivics.co/agroforestdao_gg20

• 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.

  • Donate: go.opencivics.co/etherealforest_gg20

• 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.

  • go.opencivics.co/urbanika_gg20

• 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

• • Donate: go.opencivics.co/bloomnetwork_gg20

• 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.

  • go.opencivics.co/citizenchat_gg20

• 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.

  • go.opencivics.co/moos_gg20

• 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.

  • Donate: go.opencivics.co/selfgovernance_gg20

• 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.

  • Donate: go.opencivics.co/commonagency_gg20

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

  • Twitter Link

• OpenCivics GG20 — Upgrade The System

  • Sunday, April 28th at 3p PST

  • Twitter Link

• OpenCivics x Climate Program GG20 — Civic Innovation For People & Planet

  • Tuesday, May 1st at 7p PST

  • Twitter Link

• OpenCivics GG20 — Synergistic Coordination

  • Friday, May 3rd at 9a PST

  • Twitter Link

• OpenCivics GG20 — Imagining Civic Futures

  • Monday, May 6th at 3p PST

  • Twitter Link

• Also checkout the calendar of official Gitcoin Twitter Spaces

  • View Calendar

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

We’re excited to invite you to apply for a grant from the OpenCivics Consortium Round!

💸 Round Details At A Glance:

• Applications open : April 3rd - April 16th, 2024

  • (Applications received after April 16th cannot be guaranteed review)

• Round open for donations : April 23rd - May 7th, 2024

• Apply to the round : Gitcoin Builder

• Learn more: OpenCivics Grants Program Portal

As with our first round, applicants must be OpenCivics members (you can still apply here if you haven’t already) to encourage collaboration and coordination amongst grantees. This round, we’ve expanded the matching pool to over $40,000 thanks to Gitcoin and DeCiv Fund and will be experimenting with new forms of impact measurement for our grantees. This round is taking place on the Arbitrum One network which supports Gnosis Safe multi-signature wallets. This means you can apply for a grant as a group of organizations which we encourage as part of this round’s theme: collaboration and coordination.

About The Round

This OpenCivics Consortium Round seeks to fund critical collaborative protocols, prototypes, and infrastructures that enable civic engagement and interoperable civic utilities for direct governance and stewardship of our communities and commons. We see these collaborative methods and prototypes as critically underfunded force multipliers for multi-agent coordination on key systemic leverage points that create deep social change.

Ideal applicants will be engaged in developing technology, applied research, and social processes related to collaboration and coordination for collective action. Projects may address the diverse stack of collaborative protocols needed for successful multi-agent coordination such as: identity and attestation, on-chain delegation and roles, decentralized project management, fundraising and allocation, strategic alignment processes, measurement and evaluation, and participatory governance and learning. These efforts may be theoretical and research-based or may be applied contexts of collaboration whose successful actualization could lead to protocolization of key activities and collaborative functions.

Why Collaboration & Coordination?

We see collaboration and coordination as essential civic utilities that make so many other forms of civic innovation possible. Without open source models for community groups and innovation consortia to swarm around solving problems and addressing dysfunctional systems, we won’t see the scope and depth of response needed to create a truly healthy and thriving society. For those reasons, we’re committed to prioritizing grantees whose work supports groups in coming together to govern and coordinate amongst themselves.

If you or someone you know would be a good fit for this grant round, please send them the application and encourage them to apply!

For round criteria, application guides, and additional details, please visit go.opencivics.co/grantsportal.

If you have any questions about the application process or would like feedback on your application before applying, schedule a call with Benjamin.

In Us We Trust,
Patricia, Benjamin, and Spencer
OpenCivics Stewards

• 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

Would you like to receive our latest updates?

Subscribe now

We’re excited to share with you the amazing projects we’ve selected as the cohort of grantees for the Genesis Round of the OpenCivics Grants Program!

Background

We received nearly 30 applications from a diverse array of incredible projects and selected 15 exemplary applicants who we feel are poised to leverage small donations for a large impact and are demonstrative of the full spectrum of decentralized civics and civic innovation.

These projects range from ecological and water stewardship to local community organizing to policy advocacy and more. OpenCivics Genesis Round is already one of the most popular rounds for crowdfunding donations this Gitcoin cycle! Let’s keep up the momentum and finish strong!

How to donate

Now it’s time to vote with your donations! Which projects do you want to see receive the largest portion of the matching pool?

For those not familiar with Gitcoin and Quadratic Funding, 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 $25,000 in matching funds each project receives.

Projects selected to be included in the round are now in a friendly competition to see who can receive the largest number of donations. Matching funds are distributed to projects using the Quadratic Funding algorithm, essentially a math equation that rewards projects that receive lots of donations more than those that receive a few large ones. To ensure that projects don’t game the system and create lots of web3 wallets to donate to their own projects, Gitcoin has created the Gitcoin Passport, an identity verification process that you’ll need to complete to ensure your donations are eligible to be considered in the matching funds distribution.

If you’ve already set up your web3 wallet and Gitcoin Passport, visit go.OpenCivics.co/genesisround to discover and donate to projects.

If you’re new to web3 and Gitcoin, visit learn.Metamask.io to learn how to set up a wallet and https://grants-portal.gitcoin.co to learn how to get started with Gitcoin and Gitcoin Passport.

Below is a summary of each project to give you a sense of who you’ll be able to donate to!

Ogallala Life

Ogallala Life’s mission is to learn, teach, and develop innovative tools that will empower communities across the High Plains Aquifer System. Their goal is to rehydrate the landscape that sustains these communities. They are strong advocates for distributed, diverse, nature-based infiltration earthworks and other water-harvesting interventions.

They successfully built over 110 NIDS structures (Natural Infrastructure on Dryland Streams) on stretches of 5 different ephemeral watersheds with significant hydrogeologic features. This year, they plan to follow up, maintain, and monitor, and expand this work.

Funding Priorities: Ogallala Life will utilize funds to advance ReFi in the areas of land use and water governance. Their goal is to develop superior tools that empower communities and other stakeholders to invest in local or regional landscape rehydration initiatives, which are nature-based. These investments will contribute to the sustainable management of natural resources.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/grantee-OgallalaLife

Ethereal Forest

PDX DAO has had major successes, including the General Forum on Ethereum Localism. They’re now focusing on building and researching tooling for local civic stewardship with meaningful inputs from diverse groups. Their work includes research, curating tools, engaging community, and global collaboration. Through community engagement, collaborative research, and p2p infrastructure, Ethereal Forest is composting the DAO that was PDX DAO in order to better serve their local community.

Funding Priorities: PDX DAO’s current greatest funding need is money down to bootstrap Borthwick House (as described in the project description) as a revenue source for the larger EF project, followed by funding to make research and community outreach contributions sustainable, and startup treasuries to seed the DAOs that will make up the PDX DAO ecosystem (prioritized in that order).

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-EtherealForest

Lattice Labs

Lattice Protocols are open-source collaborative protocols designed for solving systemic problems and civilizational challenges. They form connections between projects, programs, and protocols.

Latticework Labs is a collaborative contributing to civic innovation and focuses on implementing these protocols. They provide design processes, release schematics, and advisory services in the field of distributed technologies and systems change.

Latticework Labs aims to provide services with public benefit in the Civics Space. This is necessary utility for the Civics Space because collaborative behaviors and protocolization of collaboration between projects and protocols is not a focus of the design patterns. This set of collaborative protocols empowers civic collaboration at scale.

Funding Priorities: Lattice Labs will be using this grant to develop and release Lattice Protocols Collaborative Framework over next 3 months.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-LatticeworkLabs

viaPrize

viaPrize is a project that revolutionizes crowdfunding by introducing crowdfunded prizes. It empowers communities globally to propose, fund, and execute impactful projects effectively. This platform ensures contributors' confidence by holding funds in escrow until project completion, bridging the gap between existing public goods funding platforms. Its origins lie in testing the concept in a pop-up city, resulting in remarkable achievements like creating an AI voice for a river and delivering critical medical supplies to Ukraine. Seeking support to expand its impact, viaPrize has already distributed substantial prize amounts for various open-source projects and aims to enhance its platform for greater collaboration and effectiveness.

Funding Priorities: ViaPrize will allocate this grant towards applying to accelerators and fellowships while transitioning its codebase to TypeScript for increased open-source participation. They plan to launch a more web3 native platform, extending their infrastructure to support platforms like Gitcoin, Optimism, and Giveth in facilitating public goods funding. Additionally, ViaPrize aims to integrate account abstraction, streamlining wallet login via email and password and enabling credit card contributions to smart contracts, simplifying the onboarding process for web2 users.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-ViaPrize

Bloom Network

Bloom Network empowers 30,000+ people across 26 Local Hubs in 11 countries to spearhead grassroots climate actions. From food security to watershed care, they’re scaling up global regeneration led by local communities. Their digital platform, crafted by over 100 local organizers, bridges the capital gap to grassroots-led climate repair.

Funding Priorities: Bloom Network are in retroactive funding mode at this time. Grant funding would go toward completing the final payments for our smart contracts development (total $5,000 owed), and the core of our web2 app ($1,324 owed). Funds in excess of that will be put toward our core team for integrating the smart contracts - all of this infrastructure is for the purpose of paying Local Bloom members for civic innovation activities such as watershed repair and protection, local microclimate restoration, food security, and economic justice. And helping them learn from one another and access broader public support in the process.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-BloomNetwork

ReCommon

Building a platform for regenerative community land acquisition and governance, ReCommon leverage web3 technologies to secure communally stewarded lands. Their RegenCLT model and Commons Credit system facilitate resilient bioregional communities. The Commons Credit is a means for activating capital to acquire property that is held in bioregional trust, to be stewarded by the community, and used regeneratively for generations. The ReCommon platform that weaves all this together, with a governance portal and an impact dashboard that connects the property level, to the bioregional level, to the global level.

Funding Priorities: ReCommon will utilize grant funding to further the development of the ReCommon platform, which includes property-level impact data, and bioregional governance for land held in Trust. In particular, the governance structure follows the Regenerative Community Land Trust model, designed to take land off the speculative market and place it into place-based control, to be used regeneratively for generations to come. We are ready for another push on our governance documents, to codify and implement the many learnings that we've gleaned over the past 2 years since initially incorporating.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-ReCommon

The Commons Economy Roadmap

The Crypto Commons Association is launching the Commons Economy Roadmap in January 2024. This project, backed by a network of organizations, aims to promote 20 promising Blockchain4Good projects over 6 months. The goal is to transform the roadmap into a decentralized research & development protocol, fostering the growth of the Commons-Centric economy.

Funding Priorities: The Commons Economy Roadmaps seeks funds to generate a knowledge base of Blockchain4Good projects that includes a practical knowledge base and documentation of collective infrastructure that advances the systematic growth of a Commons-centric economy.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-CommonsEconomy

DAO Coalition

The DAO Coalition is a pioneering organization dedicated to advocating for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The Coalition represents the voices of the DAO ecosystem and aims to bridge the gap between the rapid innovation in the DAO ecosystem and the establishment of relevant legal clarity.

Innovation in the DAO ecosystem has been outpacing the rate at which legal clarity is established, leaving entrepreneurs, investors, and changemakers uncertain about how to proceed compliantly. The DAO Coalition intends to shed light on these matters by tapping into the insights and opinions of various DAO communities and advocating on their behalf.

Fundraising Priorities: DAO Coalition’s primary objective is to continue integrating various web3 tools, with the aim of creating a robust open-source civics suite. As they progressively build out this suite, they will begin onboarding Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) into the Coalition. Concurrently, they are preparing to raise funds for lobbying activities, which will commence as soon as their 501c4 status is finalized.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-DAOCoalition

RadicalxChange Foundation

The RadicalxChange Foundation is a global movement for next-generation political economies, founded by economist Glen Weyl in 2018. RadicalxChange is committed to advancing plurality, equality, community, and decentralization through upgrading democracy, markets, the data economy, the commons, and identity.

Funding Priorities: RadicalXChange aims to continue their exciting project of building a system of partial common ownership for art (and beyond) and continue their research and advocacy for better and more values-aligned systems of money, power-sharing over property, collective control of information and data, and more.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-RadicalxChange

Mechanism Institute

Mechanism Institute is a think tank developing digital-age institutions. Its centerpiece, the Mechanism Library, houses 130+ mechanism design patterns and 300+ implementation examples. They’ve introduced tools like the Mechanism Impact Measurement tool, the Mechanism Design Canvas, and new cryptoeconomic primitives. They also conduct Mechanism Seminars for practical strategies.

Funding Priorities: Mechanism Institute aims to further develop their Mechanism Library by expanding the existing repository of coordination mechanisms and case studies. They also plan to enhance their Forkable Tools by refining their Mechanism Impact Measurement tool and Mechanism Design Canvas. They’re also developing new Cryptoeconomic Primitives, not only mapping out the design space of existing mechanisms but also filling the gaps by advancing new mechanisms that aid with governance, identity, value capture, fundraising, and more. Lastly, they plan to conduct specialized educational seminars and workshops.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-MechanismInstitute

pact.social

Pact.social is an open-source dApp for Petitions, Manifestos, and Open-letters, or “Pacts”. It respects user privacy, doesn’t sell data, and promotes Pacts through user advocacy, not marketing tools. It rewards users for bringing new signatures to a Pact, fostering community growth. It also offers features like onchain signature for Manifestos, AI and automation for communication, and a Podcasts stream.

Funding Priorities: Pact.social’s roadmap includes infrastructure improvements, third-party services like Mailjet and Paperspace, and the hiring of freelancers for communication, marketing, and legal reviews. The company also invests in an additional developer to bolster its technological capabilities and cover administrative costs and tech audits.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-PactSocial

Pairwise

Pairwise is an open-source voting dapp that simplifies community voting by allowing users to choose between two options. It’s designed to be user-friendly, converting subjective inputs into objective outputs. It aims to improve decision-making in DAOs and promote community engagement. Pairwise can be used for prioritizing grant proposals, decentralized curation and ranking, and user research.

Funding Priorities: If funded, the grant will be strategically utilized to execute a comprehensive roadmap that includes platform development and interface refinement, weighted votes and Snapshot integration, decentralized storage and ENS integration, and creating mechanisms for incentivizing voters.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-Pairwise

Re-Public

Re-Public is an open-source software aiming to give individuals control over their personal data. It removes intermediaries between a person and their data, empowering individuals to express their will through their data. Re-Public provisions a private cloud for each user, allows secure sharing and selling of data, and offers a unique SDK for developers. It’s a solution for asserting data rights through control.

Funding Priorities: The team is planning to release a prototype user interface for user management of their private cloud. This will be followed by the launch of a new mobile app that connects to the private cloud, enhancing accessibility and convenience for users. In a move towards transparency and community collaboration, the mobile app will be open-sourced, allowing developers worldwide to contribute to its development and improvement.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-RePublic

ZK DeCiv Toolkit

The ZK DeCiv Toolkit by Holonym Foundation is a decentralized civic advocacy tool. It enables robust digital voting, censorship-resistant crypto fundraising, and private identity verification. It’s built on zero-knowledge tech and multiparty computation for privacy and resistance.

Funding Priorities: The team is engaged in a variety of activities. They are involved in software development and research and development. They’re also prioritizing outreach, connecting with new use cases and partners to expand their network.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-ZKDecivToolkit

WaterUnity Network

WaterUnity Networks (WUN) is launching its beta phase. It’s an online and in-place social framework for collaborative advocacy and networking, focusing on water stewardship. WUN uses the Watershed Wisdom Councils Concept (WWCC) to connect regenerative communities and implement restorative projects.

Funding Priorities: WaterUnity Network’s goal in 2024 is to launch into the beta phase of this initiative by organizing our core council to attract, engage and train tight teams of Water Stewards in a few of the world's most vital river basins.

Donate to this project: go.opencivics.co/Grantee-WaterUnity

We’re honored to be managing a grants round with such incredible projects alongside our Round Partners @banklesschick and @clinamenic. Please consider donating and look out for another email when the round closes to see the results. You can also donate to OpenCivics directly as part of the Web3 Community and Education Round.

Public goods are good.

In Us We Trust,
OpenCivics Stewards
Benjamin (@omniharmonic) & Patricia (@polyparkinson)

We’ve already received some amazing applications from organizations and projects like RadicalXChange, Holonymn, Re-Public, Mechanism Institute, Dandelion, and others.

We know there are other amazing civic innovation projects out there that we’d love to include in the round. To make the application process easier, we’ve created a Grants Portal with step by step guides and tutorials that will guide you through the basics of setting up a web3 wallet, creating a project on Gitcoin Builder, and submitting your grant application.

Please share the link to the Grants Portal with any person or project you think might be a good fit for the round and the consortium!

Apply for a Grant & Membership!

If you’ve been considering applying, this is your reminder to submit your grant application in the next few days to ensure your application will be reviewed in time to be included in the round.

We’ve also been consistently approving new Network members with our accepted membership now at 60 incredible systems-aware visionaries and builders. If you’re applying for a grant or wanting to engage in upcoming Network activities like our open jams or collaborative initiatives, also be sure to submit an application for membership to participate in all of these exciting opportunities.

Tune into OpenCivics’ Spaces

To promote the round and raise awareness about the amazing work of OpenCivics’ members, we’re hosting a series of Spaces on X. Join us for the first space this upcoming Monday, November 13th at 5pm PST to explore “What is Civic Innovation?”

Set a reminder

We’ll be sharing invitations to future Spaces in the coming days, but you can find a list of all our live conversations on the Grants Portal where you’ll be able to set reminders for the conversations you’re most interested in attending!

The Future of the OpenCivics

As Consortium membership continues to grow, we’re opening the doors of collaboration with some of the most well respected civic innovation projects. We see our role as Stewards of the Consortium primarily as facilitators of collaborative processes that help all of us work better together.

While our focus is currently on our Grant Round and growing Consortium membership, once the round is complete, we’ll start to expand out into facilitating collaborative initiatives and fundraising for the Consortium. Our goal is to create the minimum viable scaffolding and infrastructure to begin the process of multi-stakeholder collaboration, fundraising, and communications.

We’ve begun forming strategic partnerships with key players in the civic innovation space, ranging from technology platforms to research groups. We’re hard at work on Collaborative Initiative 00, a research and development collaborative focused on refining and publishing strategic elements of the OpenCivics Collaborative Protocol as an open source methodology for multi-stakeholder, systems-aware strategy and collaboration.

If you’re interested in participating in our initial Collaborative Initiatives around Bioregional Governance, Governance Toolkit Research, Citizen Assemblies, Decentralized Campaigning, or Food Sovereignty Networks, read about them on our wiki and be sure to have filled out a membership application with either the Citizen or Contributor role and then head over to Discord to contribute.

Thank you

We’re excited to grow this Consortium and Network together with you. We’re seeing brilliant civic innovators joining the Consortium every day and we look forward to raising funds, engaging in collaboration, and fostering a sense of non-rivalrous community with an amazing group of deeply devoted agents of systemic change.

In Us We Trust,

OpenCivics Stewards

Membership

Starting today, you can officially apply to become part of the OpenCivics Consortium as a Citizen or Collaborator. Citizens are voting members of the Consortium, able to make proposals for funding, launching and stewarding Collaborative Initiatives, and participating in decentralized governance. Collaborators are able to participate in Collaborative Initiatives within the Consortium as decentralized contributors to research and coordination activities.

If you’re not a researcher or civic innovator, you can apply to join the network as an Ally or Sponsor, giving you access to private communications channels and databases where you can keep track of the Consortium’s activities and learn about innovations you can apply in your local communities.

As a Member, you will have access to the following benefits:

🌟 Participation in cutting-edge initiatives Collaborate with fellow innovators on groundbreaking projects in governance, community organizing, currency, ecological stewardship, and more.

💡 Peer learning and networking opportunities: Engage in our private Discord, networking calls, meet other systems thinking innovators and gain insights into the latest civic innovations that you can apply in your local community or integrate into your projects.

💙 Sponsorship and support opportunities: Have the chance to contribute & receive financial resources or pro-bono services to support our mission and amplify our impact.

🌏 Grants program: Access the grants program to support your own civic initiatives and projects.

🚀 Empowerment through a community of collaboration: Join forces with others in the service of stewarding our systems.

You can read more about the different ways to get involved on our wiki here. When you’re ready to apply, fill out the application here.

Grants Program

As part of our commitment to supporting civic innovators working on the most impactful public goods that support local resilience, self-governance and democracy upgrades, and ecological stewardship, we’re launching the OpenCivics Grants Program on the Gitcoin Grants Stack. Our Genesis Round will take place November 15 - 29 and will be a Featured Community Round with $25,000 in cryptocurrency available in matching funds from our generous partner. Grant applications are open to all OpenCivics Consortium members and you can apply any time between now and November 15th. Before applying, be sure to have already filled out an application to become an OpenCivics member.

Quadratic funding is a revolutionary mechanism that amplifies donations via collective intelligence, empowering small contributors to make a significant impact alongside larger funders. The quadratic algorithm utilized by the Gitcoin Grants Protocol matches small donations with funds from a matching pool based on both the number and size of contributions, democratizing philanthropy while directing funding to a curated group of high leverage projects.

If you’d like to get involved by submitting a grant, contributing to the matching pool, or donating to OpenCivics directly, you can learn more by visiting opencivics.co/grants.

If you have any questions about membership or the grants application process, jump into our Telegram to ask questions or email team@opencivics.co.

Thank You

We’re incredibly grateful to all of our supporters, allies, and collaborators who have gotten us here. We look forward to welcoming many of you as members of the Consortium and network.

Every day we see evidence that our community is ready for non-rivalrous coordination to solve the most pressing challenges of our time. Our world is waking up to the realization that we have a short period of time to make some profound changes, and it will take all of us, working together, to make it happen. Thank you for whatever role you play in the process of rebirthing our civilization, from the small acts of civic service to the large systemic innovations that correct for our most intractable civilizational problems.

We look forward to working with you for the decades to come as we transition from an extractive, fragile, and centralized civilization into a regenerative, resilient, and decentralized one.

In Us We Trust,

OpenCivics Stewards

We’re sharing OpenCivics with the world at ETHDenver this year as part of our core mission to highlight and support the work of civic innovators working on the fundamental building blocks needed for a resilient, vital, and participatory civilization.

In addition to the panel discussions (02.28) and collaborative open space (03.01) we’ll be facilitating at the event, we have the opportunity to present on behalf of this incredible network as a speaker at Schelling Point, a premiere web3 & systems change community event. Our goal is to tell the story of civic innovation and decentralized civics as part of the larger story of systemic transformation we’re all devoted to in our own domains.

If you’re not planning on being in Denver during that time, stay tuned here to receive a streaming link for those unable to attend in person.

If you would like to participate in one of our panels or bring one of your projects (however established or nascent) into our collabathon day, reach out on the event’s Telegram group.

We look forward to hosting you and working together this year to do as a collaborative network what none of us can do on our own.

To learn more, get involved, and RSVP to reserve your spot, go to FederatedFutures.xyz

Sincerely,

OpenCivics