OpenCivics Collaborative Research Round is live and accepting donations! We are incredibly excited to be hosting an incredible display of open source research that directly serves the commons and local communities. We feel this research represents the cutting edge of civic innovation and participatory design of grassroots infrastructure, technology, and social process.
💸 Donations are now open until August 21st!
38,000 USDC Total Matching Funds Available
Important Links:
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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]
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
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)
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