Introducing the AT Protocol Community Fund
The AT Protocol Community Fund exists to provide community & event support, fund grants, and support individuals and projects. It is fiscally hosted by the Raft Foundation, a 501c3.
As part of organizing the first ATmosphere Conference, we have been accepted by the Raft Foundation as our fiscal host. The project is called the AT Protocol Community Fund, and we intend to use it to support a number of different initiatives.
Community & Event Support
We want to support communities and events in ways that focus on bringing people together and fostering collaboration.
The upcoming ATmosphereConf is a prime example, and we're hard at work planning our ATProto presence at events throughout the upcoming year.
We envision supporting other events, meetups, and special community initiatives over time. Creating fiscal sponsorship entities, building mailing lists, and finding sponsors can be significant hurdles.
The AT Protocol Community Fund can help reduce those burdens to make creating and growing AT Protocol developer communities easier.
AT Protocol Developer Grants
Bluesky has run a micro 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, especially for other Lexicons beyond micro blogging.
There is also commons infrastructure in this category, like supporting decentralizing the operations of the PLC Directory or shared relays. Existing bottoms up community initiatives like the Lexicon Community can be supported with infrastructure or open source code development support.
We will have an intake process for adding projects to our Open Collective, and have a process for supporting them with funds and advice. Each project has its own pool of funds and options for funders and individuals to support each project directly. We envision a kind of builders collective to support all kinds of projects and working groups.
Early project areas and working groups include:
- Location Data: an approach for representing geographic data on atproto across many apps, starting with venue data
- Private Data: learn together about cryptographic primitives, security & usability trade offs, and prototyping approaches
- Protocol Documentation: shared & community-maintained docs, rather than a series of Discords and distributed blog posts
There is a collaborative notes page for discussing topics of interest at ATmosphereConf – please add your own or expand what's there!
Initial Project Committee
Ted, Nick, and Boris are the initial project committee who are responsible for allocating the funds held by our fiscal host.
Ted Han @knowtheory.net, Nick Gerakines @ngerakines.me, Boris Mann @bmann.ca
We're actively going to look for additional people to join the committee, plus advisors with specialist skills, and come up with governance approaches on what kinds of projects we want to take on.
A foundation or other single large entity is an anti-pattern: we should be aiming for multi-polar coordination, with many entities pooling capital and collaboration.
Our goal is not to create an AT Protocol foundation or point of centralization, but rather support and fund important work that needs to get done in and around the protocol to make it successful. There are many individuals, open source projects, and emerging apps & startups already doing great work. Lets support them and share the opportunity cost of investing in commons work and infrastructure.
Please come see us at ATmosphereConf for more discussion on how we can work together.
Support us on Open Collective
Thank you to sponsors who have been stepping up to support ATmosphereConf so far. Our financials are transparently available on Open Collective, and we'll be adding more projects there over time.
Our Open Collective will have projects for each funded initiative
We'll end with some words from the Raft Foundation, our fiscal sponsor, from their values page:
A raft is about survival and adventure, collaboration and flow. Amidst today's torrent of crises, it's easy to feel helpless. But we believe that if we work together, we can stay afloat, and even shape our collective destiny.
We'd love to hear from you. Get in touch with us at [email protected], follow us at @atprotocol.dev, and sign up for email updates here on the site.
