Today, Grant for the Web announced five early awards for curated projects that support innovation and open standards in Web Monetization. These first awards, totaling a quarter million dollars in funding, are helping to galvanize a robust ecosystem of Web Monetized content, users, tools, and infrastructure.
As a collaborating founder of Grant for the Web, Mozilla adds its congratulations to these awardees. “It’s exciting to see efforts like these begin to build momentum toward the future web we envision, where content creators and consumers can both thrive and invasive ads aren’t the economic status quo,” says Ashley Boyd, Mozilla's VP of Advocacy and Engagement. “These projects demonstrate how a new business model for the web can better reward creators, drive more openness and decentralization online, and shift power back to individuals.”
The awardees
Free Music Archive: Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors download 2TB of openly-licensed music from Free Music Archive’s servers. This project — led by Tribe of Noise, the owners and stewards of Free Music Archive – will integrate Web Monetization into the platform while leading a community discussion about how creators and users can benefit from Web Monetization tooling built on open and sustainable web standards.
Coronavirus Tech Handbook: The custom software behind the handbook – JoeDocs – is a collaboration tool designed to support crowdsourcing and rapid community development. It allows communities to quickly assemble and simultaneously contribute to a knowledge base, and for that project to be sustained through integrated monetization. This project is being led by a small team of technologists at Newspeak House in London, and has become the world’s largest library for COVID-19 response with contributions from around the world.
DEV: A partnership between Grant for the Web and DEV on a community hackathon driving exploration and experimentation around the Web Monetization standard. DEV’s platform boasts 350k+ registered developers and millions of monthly visitors, and they will not only implement a site-wide payment pointer as a real-life application of the technology, they will also introduce functionality enabling authors to add their own payment pointer to their own posts.
2 Grant for the Web Ambassadors: The Ambassador Program funds ecosystem evangelism and dynamic case studies through support of creative, ambitious individuals willing to experiment, play, and communicate how Web Monetization can work for the long tail of content creators. The first two Ambassadors are: Hui Jing (better known in the devrel community as HJ), a web developer from Malaysia and the founder of Talk.CSS, and Cris Beasly, an entrepreneur, artist, and podcaster based in the United States who digs into progressive tech, emotional awareness, and startup topics.
Grant for the Web is a $100 million fund supporting innovation and open standards in Web Monetization. It is funded and led by Coil in collaboration with Mozilla and Creative Commons. These early awardees were selected by Grant for the Web’s Advisory Council through a vetted process for curated grants targeting research, tool development, and community experimentation. Learn more about these projects.
These projects are examples of the experimentation and innovation already building momentum around Web Monetization as a proposed open web standard. More projects and innovations are needed and emerging, and Grant for the Web is looking to support these projects.
To that end, Grant for the Web is currently seeking applications for projects to support foundational technologies or creative catalysts around the proposed Web Monetization standard through a public Call for Proposals. The deadline for applications is Friday June 12, 2020 at noon PST. Learn more at http://grantfortheweb.org/apply.