Submit Your Open Source Neighborhood Project
Gitcoin Grants and Cabin's Neighborhood Accelerator Program (NAP) just announced last week an exciting opportunity for hyper-local neighborhood builders to receive a little bit of retroactive funding for their work in community infrastructure.
You can read more about this and apply directly here.
The Neighborhood Open Source Software Grant Round will allocate $10,000 total in micro-grants for individuals who have built software solutions to empower local communities.
What I love about this initiative is that it's offering rewards for the unseen work that often gets overlooked for anyone who considers themselves to be a civic citizen, a community-builder, or a volunteer. I am unfortunately all of these things and can attest first-hand that there's not a lot of ROI in caring too much. This retroactive public goods funding round aims to correct some of that.
As they put it in the application:
"We aim to catalyze software solutions that might not otherwise get built, prioritizing projects that deliver measurable benefits to local communities. Using retroactive grants, we will assess impact based on software adoption, code contributions, and real-world improvements in problem areas, creating a sustainable feedback loop for future funding."
So if you've been building for your community, either on your own, or with a group, I encourage you to apply and help spread the word.
Why Community Matters Now More Than Ever
As I mentioned, I'm a huge fan of supporting community-based work through open source initiatives like this. I believe we are long overdue for a new, software-enabled public infrastructure of open source contributions to enable people to more easily invest in the relationships and lives of the people around them.
That's why, over the past year, I've been doubling down in hyper-local community efforts for the so-called "Neighborverse." I experienced first-hand the lingering trauma of loneliness in a post-COVID world. Particularly as a new parent, I feel like I've had to all but reinvent my local-first social network from square one since 2020.
But even for a serial community builder like me, this takes a lot of effort. Too much effort. As it turns out, the emotional labor of community-building, combined with the day-to-day upkeep required to keep your network fresh, is often the part that falls off first. And, as it turns out, it's hard enough to keep your own family's operating system under control, let alone also manage the cadence for your entire block.
I spent about six months last year actively looking for a problem in this new-age community-building world where I might be able to participate more actively (with a little funding behind it). I even got close to winning a grant or two with some ideas to use AI to supercharge my own block-building efforts. But it's hard to make the business case for community.
My hope is that initiatives like this Neighborhood Open Source Software Grant Round start to change this, enabling us all to contribute to a new collective, digitally empower infrastructure for the Neighborverse.
Applications for the Neighborhood Open Source Software Retroactive Grant Round are now open!
You can read more about the process and apply here. Applications are due on April 16. (Note that you will need a crypto wallet to apply.)
