AT Protocol Community Fund
AT Protocol Community Fund
A proposal to form an AT Protocol Community fund to support infrastructure, open source code development, and community initiatives like events and meetups.
ATmosphere Conf
We are in the midst of planning a March 2024 conference of 150 - 250 people in Seattle. The budget for this, including speaker travel expenses support, venue, food, and high quality video recordings, is currently estimated at around $30KUSD.
AT Protocol Developer Grants
Bluesky has run a small grants program, but ultimately as with other parts of the protocol, having funding and support happen outside the Bluesky entity is a better long term setup.
Peter Wang of SkySeed Fund has said that he also wants to support pure developer initiatives. There have been other discussions of companies, governments and NGO organizations that want to support AT Protocol development.
There is open infrastructure in this category, like supporting decentralizing the operations of the PLC Directory. Existing bottoms up community initiatives like the Lexicon Community might need infrastructure or open source code development support.
We would want to set an initial goal for a pool of funds, and then operationalize a grants program with channels like Open Collective.
Community Support
The ATmosphereConf is one example of a community initiative for AT Protocol that needs significant funding. Another example is FOSDEM. No one was available back in October 2024 to submit for an AT Protocol room and organize people to attend.
Aside from events, this is a bit of a fuzzy area that needs more work, but an AT Protocol Community Fund would form part of the support infrastructure so that not everyone has to seek their own fiscal host.
Applications
Superbloom Design
Please give a general overview of the project/initiative, with a focus on the theory of change. What change does your project seek to bring about in the world? How, and with whom? Please include detail about the type of work/interventions, e.g. research, advocacy, policy.
AT Protocol is a promising new protocol for broad, "open world" global communication. Created by Bluesky which runs a core Twitter-like platform with now over 27M accounts, AT Protocol needs infrastructure and resources for bottoms up community development.
Superbloom Design’s mission is to change who technology serves. We believe technology design is integral to the open source movement and should be leveraged to affect societal change. How does your work align with this mission?
Raft Foundation
"brings communities together to support neighbors in need" with collective care, movement infrastructure, and societal transformation, with this section being most relevant for us:
community technology (decentralized tech; open, copyfair, and alternative licensing; security, privacy, anti-surveillance, and encryption; alternative legal and financing structures)
Intake form
Describe your project and its purpose in 1-3 sentences.
The AT Protocol Community Fund is designed to support shared compute infrastructure, open source code development, design, and documentation, and larger community initiatives like conferences. As a protocol that can support many different data types, there is an opportunity to pool funds and collaboration with commons infrastructure.
Briefly, why are you looking for a fiscal sponsor today?
Why now? Are there any deadlines we should keep in mind?
The upcoming conference at the end of March 2025 is one driver for fiscal sponsorship, so that sponsorship funds and expenses don't flow through individual bank accounts.
There are a number of other initiatives, starting with infrastructure for adding geo data to AT Protocol, that will also soon be looking to pool grant funding.
Are you hoping to be an independent nonprofit organization someday?
Not sure yet.
Briefly, what are the project's short-term needs?
A turn key fiscal sponsor so that we don't have to setup an independent entity. Invoicing sponsors, re-imbursing expenses, signing venue and contractor contracts. Likely an Open Collective and a Stripe account.
Taking in grant funds for one or more infrastructure projects.
Briefly, what are the project's mid-to-long-term goals?
Operating a grants program to fund open source development and operation of the AT Protocol Network. Connecting development expertise with community-based orgs to succeed in deploying technical infrastructure of open social protocols.
Running one or more pieces of ongoing infrastructure for the AT Protocol network, such as the PLC Directory, Geo Search and Lookup, Lexicon based search and feed infrastructure. Employing dedicated infrastructure staff. Supporting open source development of components. Participating in protocol governance development and definition.
Tell us (again, briefly) about your financial situation: past activities, current status, and future goals.
Running Tech Talks and Dev Discussions since September 2024. Announced and started planning a conference for March 2024.
Please describe any prior relationships and contractual commitments the project will bring with it.
For example, grants coming in, contracts with vendors or venues, government contracts, independent contractors, employees, recurring donors, funder relationships.
Early sponsors have committed some funds for the conference. Estimated budget is $30K, with about half of that from ticket sales.
Submitted grant proposal for $50K to early funders, and collecting feedback on interest in supporting the grant.
What interests you about Raft Foundation, specifically?
The description and goals of what kinds of projects you are going to support seem very aligned. Have met Nathan and seen his work at Open Collective, which is a tool we have found integral and keep using.
Take a look at Raft's founding and secondary principles. What are the top three most-aligned principles, when it comes to your project?
Going to pick top 5 with some comments.
- Resilience: working together with support structures and entities
- Transparency in service of accountability: trust comes from seeing where funds are allocated. With Open Collective, an invitation for anyone to contribute financially, large and small.
- We can shape the future, but only together: we can't do this alone. What structures and networks can we lean into. Pooling expertise and support, avenues to contribute. What is the glue between people, companies, co-ops and groups of all kinds.
- Tech is a tool, our data is ours: tech is in service of communication, collaboration, and human connections. Agency and choice.
- Interoperable technologies, intersectional lives: for everyone, by everyone. Voice and exit. We have many real world problems to solve, and interoperable tech means we can work on the higher level, harder stuff.
Additionally, your note on open source strongly resonates:
we understand that "open source" is no panacea, and is in fact the bedrock of post-dotcom technocapitalism. We are thus quite interested in experiments and more radical licenses. Fundamentally, however, we a practical approach to technology, prioritizing usability/accessibility, then data sovereignty, then licensing and self-hostability.
We believe that protocols are more important than code licensing. And we agree that we're in a post-open source-1.0 world. Cross License Collaboratives, co-op structures, and other entity, network, and licensing options are very interesting. The DWeb movement has principles that resonate in a framing that is also a superset of pure code licensing.
Are there any areas where you think we may not be aligned, or where we are "less-aligned"?