RIPE NCC Community Fund 2023

Community
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Broadly speaking you need a make spreadsheet with the following:

  1. EU. All of them are listed here EU Funding & Tenders Portal. Start with a general search to narrow down areas of interest, identify a pool of potentials. Track them in your spreadsheet.
  2. National (dependent on where you’re registered). Look at the various government department websites relevant to your domains (i.e. communities and technology), track any grants you find in your spreadsheet.
  3. Foundations (e.g. Mozilla, Omidyar). Same thing. Search for foundations with funds focused on communities and technology. Track them in your sheet.

I would suggest a first pass at this in a single session on a single day. Searching for funds and grants is overwhelming. Schedule some dedicated time for it. Have a clear strategy about how you’re going to do it. Do it. Put some dates in your calendar. Schedule a second session (at least a month down the track). Then move on with your life :slight_smile:

You can, but an entity called “ActivityPub Foundation” with a homepage of activitypub.rocks (with some recent activity on it) would be more likely to succeed. How you pitch yourself, the vehicle and brand you use, is just as important as the content of your pitch.

Think about it this way. Imagine you’re a junior associate at the Omidyar Network. Maybe you’ve heard about Mastodon once or twice. You probably don’t know what ActivityPub is. They read your application (one amongst hundreds) and connect those dots for the first time. That itself is a critical “connection point”. If they then have to go on to try and understand how another organisation, e.g. petites singularités, interacts with this new concept they’ve just wrapped their heads around, it’s going to be a bridge too far.

Yes, there will be funds like NGI Zero where the person reading your application already knows who you are and what you’re doing. But if you limit your scope to people who already know you and what your mission that’s, well, quite limiting. You need a clear, compelling and simple pitch to people who don’t already know what ActivityPub is.

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All good advice, BUT the is a compleat lack of funding for the community (non #mainstreaming) side of tech, I have put in more than ten funding applications over the last few years to all the openweb funding flows.

And the answer, if the is one, is always the same, some of the replies:

" This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for - which holds for the vast majority of
FOSS efforts, to be sure, but for things this high up in the stack even
*more." *

“I don’t have an obvious candidate for you to go to either”

The issue is that this is actually a LIE, the funders do fund the subjects we are applying for, just they ONLY fund the shadow of the #deathcult because they do not understand anything outside this. Or if they do understand, they are to afried of their funding flows drying up if they did fund anything outside this shadow.

“What the times are and how they are changing is different from every perspective. And so is utility. Not every project can be equally successful from everyone’s point of view. From our vantage point the process we deliver seems to work better than the vast majority of other processes (there are many tens of billions spent less frugality and with no impact at all within the same EC frameworks, I’m sure you’ll agree). Future history will have to prove the approach right or wrong,”

So good advice is nice, change challenge is better, ideas please for change challenge of this funding mess.

Or this openweb reboot is going to be absorbed by the #mainstreaming, not a bad thing, but it’s NOT the project meany of have been working on #KISS

“Obviously, we are always eager to haul in new projects - so do send projects you deem worthy our way.”

Ten funding applications latter, it’s a problem, I think we need both being nice and not being nice, and we need these together to break this LIE in funding. On this forum we have fucked this path over the last few years - the spiky fluffy debate has not been respected. This holding the “debate” in place is the secret of all working/affective activism, hint, hint. And we are doing activism in this openweb reboot, I understand the majority of people like to deny this, but this denying makes these people prats and the problem not the solution

#KISS ps. there is the word “stupid” in this hashtag, in this am not calling any individual stupid, so please don’t take this as pointing at YOU personally I am talking about social groups, stupid #mainstreaming fearful groups.

#NLnet #NGI #ngizero #summerofprotocols #investinopen #RIPENCCag.

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I understand where you’re coming from @hamishcampbell. I would suggest it’s mostly about how you pitch something. For example, if you describe your project in a grant application like this:

ActivityPub is the fastest growing social media open standard. The SocialHub was created during the first ActivityPub conference, in October 2020 in Prague, to supplement the Social Web Incubator Community Group and encourage a strong, cooperative ActivityPub standard steering as a Special Interest Group. The need for a community infrastructure independent from W3C was felt as the proposed tools were limiting inclusiveness of non-W3C members, which form the bulk of the ActivityPub community ; and also because focusing on ActivityPub discussions on the SocialCG mailing-list felt spammy towards alternative routes chosen by others. This project aims to consolidate ongoing efforts towards self-sustainability of the developer community, identifying valuable assets that emerged over the last three years, and relieving the community of hosting burdens so we can focus on collective governance and the formation of a collective governing body for decentralized efforts.

The junior associate reading your application has to understand too many complicated concepts and histories to get excited. You have to put the most broadly compelling part of what you’re doing front and centre, e.g.

  1. “We are the convening organisation for the open social web”
  2. “We are the solution to the toxicity of the attention economy”
  3. “We are convening the alternatives to Twitter”
  4. “We are connecting thousands of communities together”

etc etc. The point is not that my pitches are perfect either, but you have to meet people where they are. Most people have no idea what ActivityPub is, don’t know the minutiae of online collective efforts and what they (we) care about. Most people, including those in the technology industry, have no idea what organisations like the W3C do, or why they matter. They probably do know about the broad debates about social media though. You have to pitch to people in words and concepts they’ll understand.

This doesn’t mean you don’t still carry on whatever mission you’re already carrying on. It just means that the message in your grant pitch, and the vehicle you use to make that pitch, needs to meet your audience where they are.

(@how, I don’t mean this as a criticism of the content or the substance of what you’re doing. I’m just commenting on of the way it’s pitched, and the vehicle used for the pitch)

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has absolutely nothing for us. I know because I was talking to DG-CNCT commissioners while they were preparing Horizon Europe, and when the calls went out, we were so disappointed. Anyway we have 3 ongoing HE projects, two of which provide cascading funding, but none for community building.

is problematic since we are scattered across the world. petites singularités could go for Belgian funding, there is some, but they’re usually not focused on international digital matters.

Our best bet here would be STF, or the program 5.1 of FPH or its programme 10. I don’t think it’s wise to get to US-based funds, nor corporate ones, although I know the Ford Foundation would be a good bet (but I cannot help thinking of Henry Ford, the Nazi).

We could go through any of EdgeFunders members, and the whole list of funding sources, but this still requires strong commitment and alignment, which I think we’re still lacking. We have seen organizations around ActivityPub come and go, and the SocialHub is still here, with very low overhead, but also not enough commitment from the community. The RIPE NCC proposal was really about getting this discussion started: every stakeholder gets a year of hosting, which is not much, but enough to get everyone’s attention about what to do next.

Your proposal of setting up an Estonian corporation might bring new life to this initiative.

We cannot apply to NGI Zero because we’re a part of it.

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You may be right, but I’d be surprised if there was truly nothing. There are just so many grants and sub-grant programs.

Yes, which is partly why a new entity might help, depending on where it’s registered.

I think a fresh review might be helpful. I find that people tend to rule themselves out of things prematurely. It depends on the scope and the type of pitch you’re making. Start with the most ambitious scope for what you’re doing, i.e. “ActivityPub” itself. Don’t prematurely limit it.

Again, a separate entity could help you there.

@how I do get where you’re coming from. Partly what I’m trying to do here is motivational. I know this kind of thing can seem sisyphean. And that you have a long and mature history with it. I think a reset on your approach, going back to first principles, could help you move forward here a bit.

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