The first Internet protocols decentralized computing and allowed users to consume digital content. The second iteration ushered in the World Wide Web by enabling users to consume, create and share digital content together.
Promote blockchain technology’s potential to benefit all members of society by educating stakeholders, conducting research and developing policies on, and building community support for blockchain technologies. A “train the trainer” blockchain education program for community college professors and CA government staff.
The Decentralized Future Council (DFC) is a collaboration between the Internet Education Foundation and FFDW. DFC is dedicated to raising awareness for the larger ecosystem of new technologies, from blockchain to cryptocurrency. The Council works to educate policymakers about new and upcoming challenges that correspond with these emerging technologies, including privacy, security, democracy, online trust and safety, and more.
Distributed Press is an initiative to build an open source, no-code publishing tool for the World Wide Web and DWeb to empower authors and amplify free expression worldwide. We are collaborating with Hypha Worker Cooperative and Sutty worker co-operative to build Distributed Press. The tool will take DWeb-native publications mainstream as a reliable end-to-end DWeb publishing platform and enable all creators to publish to the DWeb. New technical features of Distributed Press will be showcased in COMPOST, a magazine centering stories about the digital commons.
In partnership with researchers from the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, the Initiative ensures that large geospatial datasets are accessible to research organizations and the general public. This collaboration with FFDW will help the Initiative develop the capacity and infrastructure for uploading, analyzing, and extracting large quantities of data using decentralized storage technologies, including Filecoin and IPFS.
EFF is an essential champion of user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development, and has been since their founding in 1990. Their staff of nearly 100—including lawyers, activists, and technologists–works to ensure that our rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our reliance on technology grows worldwide. EFF works on issues at the local, state, federal, and international levels on six main issue areas: free speech, digital privacy, creativity and innovation, transparency, international, and security.
The three-year FFDW award supports infrastructure, user experience, and security enhancements for tools used by journalists around the globe. It’s also being used to explore a zero-trust architecture for SecureDrop, an open-source news and information submission system used by newsrooms worldwide for secure document exchange and communication between journalists and anonymous sources. Overall, the award helps to further the FPF’s efforts to preserve historically critical information, such as its comprehensive database of press freedom violations in the United States and government data that belongs in the public sphere.
Gray Area is a 21st-century countercultural hub catalyzing creative action for social transformation with a mission to cultivate, sustain, and amplify a community of creative practitioners who apply antidisciplinary practice at the intersection of art and technology towards engaging with the complex challenges facing our world. The collaboration supports the development of DWeb curriculum for the Gray Area Learn online arts education platform with new course tracks that will empower creators to incorporate DWeb technology into their creative practices.
This project between FFDW and the Guardian Project is aimed at breaking down the notion that centralization is a necessary requirement for providing meaningful security and authentication for content veracity and distribution. It incorporates decentralized storage and communication technology into ProofMode, a system that enables authentication and verification of multimedia content captured on smartphones and is leveraged by human rights organizations across the globe. This project also accelerates the adoption of decentralized storage technology for F-Droid, the leading free and open-source app publishing platform.
As a specialized lab within the Harvard Law Library, LIL explores new ways for libraries to share knowledge through technology; the Democratizing Open Knowledge program is focused on enhancing discovery and engagement with open data and exploring new ways to preserve digital information. FFDW’s support enables the Library to explore how decentralized and open web technologies can help advance discovery and preservation of human knowledge, including using decentralized storage technologies like Filecoin and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS).
HRDAG has been turning raw data into analyzable data for nearly 30 years. The collaboration between FFDW and HRDAG focuses on outreach to and research with human rights organizations across the globe to explore how and when storing and accessing data on the decentralized web may be beneficial to their work.
The Internet Archive runs dozens of projects, including: the Wayback Machine, a repository of 475 billion web pages; OpenLibrary.org, a free, digital lending library of over 4.6 million eBooks; Software Collections, designed to preserve and provide access to rare or difficult to find software titles that enable gamers to play them through emulation; and Community Webs, which trains, supports, and provides web archiving resources to public librarians at institutions across the U.S. and Canada. The Internet Archive also hosts the Filecoin Archives, a community-led project to curate, disseminate and preserve important open access to information often at risk of being lost. Filecoin Foundation's contribution to the Internet Archive advances the mission of both organizations to preserve humanity's most valuable information and improve access to information online.
FFDW and MuckRock are teaming up to integrate decentralized storage technology for DocumentCloud, a platform that currently hosts over 8 million verified documents. This collaboration will expand MuckRock’s leading accountability and transparency tools to a much wider range of use cases. It will allow DocumentCloud to become a bridge for newsrooms, non-profits, researchers, and more to move key public interest documents to Filecoin, a decentralized storage network, and support preservation, publication, and analysis efforts
OpenArchive is a nonprofit dedicated to advancing human rights by empowering people to collect, verify, and securely preserve mobile media using distributed backends. Through the collaboration with FFDW, OpenArchive is exploring decentralized backends for the Save app. This will enable people on the ground capturing images and footage of world events to leverage IPFS and Filecoin and other decentralized storage options via their mobile device.
The Prelinger Archives is using its award from FFDW to digitize a vast collection of archival 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film footage to further its mission to make rare and one-of-a-kind films accessible to the general public. This project will also support uploading the data onto a decentralized repository in order to increase the resilience and longevity of digital preservation.
Shift Collective is a nonprofit that helps cultural memory organizations better engage, collaborate with, and reflect their local communities. FFDW’s support enables SHIFT to map the decentralized storage needs of memory organizations, such as galleries, libraries, archives and museums, and build a pilot storage network, with Historypin.org as a basis, to be tested in collaboration with institutional and community archives partners. The goal is to design an early prototype for community-centered, non-extractive, affordable, and accessible long-term, decentralized storage.
Spritely’s mission is to put people directly in control of their online identities and relationships. This award helps further the organization’s efforts on projects ranging from decentralized identity to decentralized social networks to encrypted and portable storage. This technology is open, free, and built to enable a gatekeeper-free path, where users and social content are not tied to a specific server or company.
FFDW’s commitment to Starling Lab will be used to support their work to prototype tools and principles to bring historians, legal experts, and journalists into the new era of Web3. In particular, this partnership will support the development of open-source tools, best practices, and case studies to verifiably document human and civil rights violations, war crimes, and testimony of genocide. Starling Lab’s work to preserve human right violations, with help of Filecoin’s decentralized storage network, has been highlighted in Fast Company and CNN.
TechCongress is an organization that provides fellowships to bridge the informational gap between technologists and policymakers in Congress by placing computer scientists, engineers, and other technologists on Capitol Hill to serve as technology advisors to members of Congress.
Working with a network of partners, TechSoup supports change makers worldwide as they use digital solutions to achieve their own goals. With FFDW’s award, TechSoup kicked off a new project, Accelerating Makers, dedicated to supporting decentralized technologies in the civil society tech stack. Accelerating Makers will support a breed of early-stage creators so they can understand and adopt decentralized technologies in their work and lives.
Ushahidi's Election Data Resilience Initiative aims to make election data accessible and verifiable. This project plans to create a permanent repository of election data using Filecoin, a decentralized storage network. This will make the data more accessible to researchers, policymakers, and the public and help ensure it cannot be altered.
WITNESS is an international nonprofit organization that helps people use video and technology to protect and defend human rights. With the support of FFDW, WITNESS will explore how the decentralized web can support the work of activists, civic journalists, and smartphone witnesses who go to great lengths to capture human rights accounts, building upon a 30-year history bridging the needs of communities with the global technology systems in which they live and work.
The Web Foundation advances Sir Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for an open web that is safe, trusted, and empowering for all of its users. Decades after his invention, over 5 billion people are on the web and it faces constant and evolving threats to his vision. This FFDW partnership will help to relaunch the Web Index--providing unique data and insights to help us better understand what is happening in the online lives of its users, shedding light on where the Web is going, what emerging issues we should be monitoring, and in what areas a course correction is needed.
As we pursue our goal of supporting an internet for everyone, it is imperative that we best understand how people around the world use the internet. To help us with this understanding, Connect Humanity is implementing a series of global surveys through a network of thousands of community-focused organizations to pull down data on how their communities rely on, benefit from, and want to see in the internet. Connect Humanity recently completed a widespread survey and scenario process to inform and deliver a report (and subsequent workshops) to summarize civil society gaps and needs toward the advancement of digital equity.
Sacred Stacks is an initiative within the Media Design Lab at the University of Colorado. The project explores how decentralized technologies may benefit communities centered around deep commitments, like spiritual experimentation, collective study, and social transformation. In this collaboration, we explore how decentralized tools and selfgovernance practices can make these communities even stronger.
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