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FediForum October 2026

Democratic Tech Fund

Topics Funding models

Conveners: Wouter Tebbens (@wtebbens@social.coop), Misha Velthuis (@MishaVelthuis@social.edu.nl)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Website: https://democratictech.fund

Notes

  • An informal discussion on what we’re hoping to achieve as the Democratic Tech Fund

  • There are so many cool projects. There is so much cool tech. There are so many people with cool plans.

  • We need more capacity. We need funding.

    • “Open source is not enough”

    • NLnet, Open Tech Fund, et al but who else is building social capacity?

  • How did Misha join?

    • Seemed like a crowdfunding campaign and wanted to donate a few euros a month to the effort. Working with student group to help others set up self-hosting like they had. More than funding, also assistance.

    • OpenTechAUC: collective of students and staff. University talked about digital sovereignty, but continued to invest in Azure. So we created our own Bonfire, Cryptpad for students to use.

  • Initial parties making contributions: Free Knowledge Institute, eCommons, Commons Network, Co-op cloud, Platoniq Foundation, Goteo, Waag, Platform Coops, OpenTechAUC

  • Jaz-Michael: Least responded part of its survey is how do you pay bills for community servers. Monthly commitments exceeding revenue from users. IFTAS supporting the operation of these servers and managing the community. Cost of community is 10x the monthly hosting bill. Complying with encroaching regulations, illegal/non-compliant hosting of content. The swell of civil society money a few years ago has gone away. Typically was only there for research and startup and rarely for operations. So what are you specifically looking to fund?

  • Wouter: Democratic Tech: mission driven, community-governed

    • Communication as equals

    • Community care

    • Communal self-governance

  • FKI: 5 Pillar framework: sharing knwoledge, mobilizing resources, co-governance, co-production, shared resources surrounded by community

  • Not funding specific tech, that’s what NLNet and others do, so we focus on “social capacity”

    • Launching at MozFest in Barcelona, when people will be able to start adding their campaign proposals, getting feedback from the DTF community before launch to strengthen campaign

  • Collective funding machinery: crowdfunding

    • Solidarity funds going to projects with match funding from cities/public institutions/philanthropy

    • crowd.democratictech.fund

  • Misha: we want to help existing communities that already have some level of solidarity to get the support to use the better tools and have the digital equivalent of that solidarity

  • Jaz: These communities still have non-technical needs they may not be capable or prepared to handle. These are problems we can’t fund at the community level and something higher.

  • Johannes: Would be use for us to come up with list of all the things that have to be funded to make this work, how big the pieces are, and which parts are already being funded or not funded at all. “landscape report”. This would be helpful to visualize and help you figure out what you want and don’t want to do. The name of your org implies funding all of it, but you are funding a subset of it.

    • Wouter: Yes, focus on funding social capacity.

    • Jeremiah: Please reach out to Evan / Social Web Foundation regarding its Grant for the Web grant project regarding economic sustainability surveying and reporting. This sounds like a great idea for them to incorporate.

  • Wouter: we are focused on donation-based funding

  • Jaz: https://about.iftas.org/library/about-the-iftas-community-library/

  • Jaz: A 10,000-person community just got tasked to help shut it down because they thought they could just cover the server costs, but operators were burned out.

    • Nobody funds moderation, mental health for moderators, CSAM detection. The Internet we grew up on is going away. We are going to be subject to increasing number of regulations and having to deal with conflict between communities. He now has years of experience working with communities that got started but then crumbled under their own weight.

  • Jaz: Software platform developers need to help the operators of their community server software, not just end users.

  • Johannes: What’s missing? What kind of organisation would need to be set up?

    • Jaz: Missing an entity for convening. First, ask people what they need. The annual survey does this. We need to use what we’ve heard from people already. Tried to create a larger trade group and was not successful. We have years of people saying what they need.

    • Jaz: If people are asking for better security (e.g. LLM scraping by surveillance states), safer spaces, etc, let’s give them that if we want to get more people to join the fediverse.

    • Johannes: you’re kind of describing the Fediverse: people build stuff first, and then ask themselves why nobody is joining. You need to have the “end user survey”: what are people asking for.

  • Anca: How much are you planning to spend on that day?

    • Wouter: We have no money to distribute. We are a collective fund. We put in the money together. Crowdfuding, maybe seed funding. In future, match with public/private institutions.

    • Anca: So more of a gathering point for funding

    • Wouter: yes