Radworks

Posted on Jan 20, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

Radicle Grants: Funding Open Source to Grow Open Source 🌱

On Monday, January 10th, the Radicle community voted to fund the first wave of the Radicle Grants Program. With six months and a $1M budget, the Radicle Grants Program will fund contributions that improve the Radicle ecosystem, and in turn, improve tooling for decentralized, open-source collaboration.

With these Treasury-funded community grants, we believe we are planting the first seeds of will grow to become a new model for funding open source. The aim is to directly support open source initiatives that help grow the Radicle product, the Radicle community, and the greater FOSS and Web3 community at large.

In essence: funding open source to grow open source πŸ’«

The Committee

The Grants program will be managed by a committee made up of Radicle community members:

This group will act as signers of the Radicle Grant Program's multi-sig, which will ultimately fund projects. All Radicle Grants operations & budgets will be publicly managed and hosted on Radicle via the grants.radicle.eth org. The repositories are also mirrored on GitHub.

What is the scope of these grants?

We are open to funding anything that improves the Radicle ecosystem or the greater FOSS and Web3 community at large. Generally speaking, we have two categories of grants to do so:

🌱 Seed Grants

Seed grants are meant for smaller contributions, both in terms of complexity and cost. These grants are for individuals or small teams looking for less than $50,000 in funding.

Applications for seed grants are reviewed by the grants committee on a rolling basis. If accepted, applications are then published publicly in our repositories.

🌲 Tree Grants

Tree grants are meant for larger teams, companies, or foundations working on a contribution larger in scope and complexity. They can provide funding from $50,000 - $500,000.

Applications for tree grants are reviewed and discussed by the grants committee and community at large on a rolling basis. They may take more time to review.

How do I apply for a grant?

There are two ways to apply for a Seed or Tree grant:

🎨 Freeform

Submit an application for any work you think deserves funding, whether it's a contribution to Radicle, FOSS, or Web3 in general.

πŸ’Œ Request for Proposals (RFP)

Submit an application towards an existing request for proposals, most likely posted by us on Discourse forum. RFPs describe work that the Radicle core team & community would like to see developed and/or prioritized!

  • If we've posted an RFP, just drop a reply on Discourse with some details on why you'd be a good fit. You can see some of the details we're looking for here.

If you don't want to work on a grant, but have an idea, feel free to create an RFP using our template and post it on the grants category of radicle.community.

Which application is right for me?

🌱 If your project is smaller in scope, has a shorter timeline, and/or can be clearly defined by a set of deliverables, a Seed Grant is probably best. It's a faster process.

🌲 If your project is larger in scope & timeline, features more complex technical work, and/or requires longer-term collaboration, we recommend a Tree Grant. Tree Grants are also best fit for partnership proposals.

What happens after I apply?

If applying for a Seed Grant, your application will be reviewed by the Grants Committee on a rolling basis. You should receive a response within a week.

For Tree Grants, once your application is published via radicle.community, the application will remain open for public discussion. Unless further discussion is warranted, you should receive a response within two weeks.

After an application is submitted and reviewed, the committee will vote to approve funding. Once approved, you will receive a first payment (40%) to kickoff the grant work. Upon completion, you will receive the remaining 60%.

Where can I find more info?

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out on the Grant's #general space on Radicle's Discord. Or contact the grants lead at [email protected].

You can find more information in the Radicle Grants workspace. We also archive info, such as past grants, on the Grant Program's GitHub repo.

You can also view this repo on Radicle by entering the following into your browser to track it in Radicle Upstream:

radicle://link/v0/rad:git:hnrkphrmf3xgtwjxuw9frfpdhuksurbw9s97o

It's that easy!?

Yup, that's it.

Head over to Discourse and apply today!