Grants Opportunities for your IPFS & Filecoin Projects - Michelle Lee

final presentation uh michelle lee uh michelle is a people-centered software maker currently she leads the developer onboarding group at protocol labs um and she's got an extensive history behind that and i will you know give her a chance to introduce herself um she was a code for america fellow with the city of philadelphia and then a co-founder and ceo of text zen platform that helps cities connect with their residents through text and email workflows previously she invented google forms which i know we all use designed online trust and safety tools for ebay and studied human computer interaction at stanford quite an interesting background and she'll be with us in just a second uh michelle i want to thank you again for joining us adding to the intrigue of what we have today for the summit hi luke thank you so much for having me of course [Music] all right well i'm very delighted to come here and tell you about all the ways that i want to give you all money um so in a moment i will be sharing my screen and talking through some of our grants programs um at the file coin and ipfs projects so here we go all right so welcome everyone thanks for hanging in there um through such a long long and exciting day and uh thank you very much to our organizers for putting together such a jam-packed schedule um so i am calling from philadelphia which is on the east coast of the us it's a subtropical climate it's hot and humid it's 90 degrees fahrenheit today um trust me i'm going somewhere with this i spent a lot of time mountain biking and we joke that our local trail system is the jungle and everything's alive in the jungle and and that's what building in web 3 feels like right now there's just so much creative and unstoppable activity um a lot of different intertwined projects and movements really hard to untangle them and you can see things like hey ferns are taking advantage of the shade of the of the bigger trees for their ideal climate and you've got vines growing up these branches and taking over the trail in the background it's getting narrower um and so this is a really exciting and inspiring place to be building um but we also don't want to take these conditions for granted so plants need moisture nutrients shade need a lot of things to grow not just as individual plants but an interconnected and mutually beneficial system and so that's why we call our community and growth group the ecosystem working group at the final point in ipfs projects and our mission is to enable developers and entrepreneurs like yourselves to execute on your dreams through advocacy uh technical support grants collaborations as you iterate towards success and uh get ready to hit escape velocity whatever that means for you whether that is um you know hey that was a great learning project now i'm gonna put it on pause and try something else um or hey my open source project is sustainable because i found these ways to have a really engaged and um and extensive volunteer network um or you reach profitability or you go after accelerator programs and adventure investments so really any model where um we're bringing in people uh just getting started building in web3 you know realizing the software or the technology projects of your dreams um and then uh using um you know using the the collective community support to to help you get to the next level so today i want to specifically talk about some of the grants programs as an overview we have three tracks of grants next step microgrants we have open grants and we have targeted grants so i'll talk about the micro grants first the next step micro grants are really straightforward program um it is offering five thousand dollars to take the next step on your project so um in the application which i'll i'll walk through shortly um all we're asking is did you start something like is is there evidence on github that you started building in this ecosystem and do you have a credible plan to get to the next step and open source that work so um that's all uh filecoin ipfs or lib pdp should be used in the project stack but it can also be uh indirectly through frameworks like textile or pinata pinning services or really anything that builds on top of those it's a very lightweight application with a weekly review i will share these urls again later um but i just want to walk through the process so you can see on the left side we have um some accepted grant applications uh this is all in the github repos uh for you to check out the history um to apply you create a new issue there is a template with six questions some of those questions asks you ask you for links to things uh you know in your github repo or in the community forums but basically it's a page and a half of information um and we review these every single week so trying to get back to you quickly we have um we've had grantees who needed these funds to pay an infrastructure a hosting bill we've had grantees who've used these funds to hire great designers and and uh and ux writers so that their app would be more more user friendly and and um and more popular we've had folks use this to fund their own time so um so that they could continue investing in the project so it's really uh there's no restriction on the funds other than it has to go directly towards your project um and that's the micro grants program um let's see after this uh we come to open grants so open grants uh range typically from five thousand to fifty thousand dollars um for novel work to apply ipfs file pointer lib pp to new domains or to bring significant new usage so really any project that um that has promise of you know really extending these networks or these ecosystems or maybe integrate these technologies into your existing project so it's still very open-ended there are a few dedicated tracks that are listed in the repository um we specifically have some collaborative grants with the hedera token service with chain link oracles more are coming in the next two weeks so a lot of collaborations across web 3 that we're interested in seeing people you know use combine multiple projects into into a single application um there are also some rfps for for specific um areas of interest but we're also i believe more than three quarters of open of grants are awarded to open open you know new id completely new ideas so um we want to hear everything that you have uh to share um i would call it a middleweight application process uh it's a little more than an issue but it's a lot a lot simpler than really most application processes and we review these every month so just to walk through um some of the process uh you you know create your own project idea that meaningfully advances the stack um you can also check out the rfps um for lists of ideas or areas of interest then you submit a pr using the proposal templates i believe it's about two pages of information to fill out really just looking for you know a a strong proposal that includes evidence that you've thought through the problem that uh you know that you have the experience to deliver on it um and that you're breaking it down into realistic milestones so um that's the open grants uh you know shape or structure um we review these every month um and so the longest you'll have to wait for responses is one month um and what you know it used to be quarterly but we wanted to move towards an even faster review cycle to um to give people the chance to you know hear back and make their plans and get on with building your project so um just a few of the past grantees i i wish um i wish i had time to share all of them with you because there are some really cool projects um this was one of my favorite micro grants this year um to a project called ajam and it's a web application that hosts asynchronous jam sessions for musicians so you can record little snippets of you know you playing one track um it publishes to ipfs and then you can also invite other users to contribute their tracks to you know to your hot new record really really cool use of ipfs there um another one uh much lower in the stack this is for a project called go graph split so if you're storing directly on file coin and you're not using one of the many really awesome and easy to use storage helpers if you're building directly on a core file code implementation you need to split your data set into pieces smaller than either 32 or 64 gigs and this is just a really simple and clean utility that can split your split your data into the right size data set so you know really nice little building block um uh yeah it's not necessarily trying to solve every problem in the world but it solves one particular problem really neatly so we really like to see tools like this that can be used by a lot of different players um and then here's a very different project this is a whole initiative it's not just software but it's also the program system and working with a local uh regional governments to make this happen um it's a geo web project and it's a set of protocols and systems for tying digital property rights to physical land um in parts of the world where um there can be a lot of uh you know unclear land records so um there are also grids we also give grants to community builders so sometimes it's not just software that you ship or an application that you publish um but we've had grantees propose hosting meetups or you know someone who's fantastic at building communities requests a bit of funding to host a you know a small or a large event we've also awarded a grant recently to a team that was building uh an incubator program for storage providers so you know coaching and developing small-scale storage providers so that we could further decentralize the system and and help even uh even more new players get on board so um as you can see wide wide range of grantees um i know that there are two you know two of these are open grants and so that means the teams have probably had more experience working together but we also really really like to award micro grants so don't hesitate to apply um your all you need is just you know some evidence that you've started building in this realm so um it does not have to be a fully featured app before you apply in fact the whole point is to help you get there so really uh want to encourage anyone who is interested in these ideas to to consider applying for grants um here are a few ways to reach us uh i think that um having raised venture capital before i think that the um the the climate of those conversations can be a little adversarial and we aim to be the opposite of that um we really are here to support and encourage you um with resources to to help build new things on top of this web 3 stack so one way to reach us is to create a draft pr so with your submission or file an issue and label it work in progress um you're not penalized at all for these early submissions and we're happy to you know work with you to help shape it into something that's a strong application um you can also email us grants.filecoin.org or join in the fileplan project slack the grantstash questions channel um happy to answer any questions that you have there so um that's about it from us i you know uh in addition to the grants team i also lead our um developer advocacy group so we have a lot of ways that we want to you know get to know what you're building support you encourage you um and really build the future of web3 together so thanks very much um luke is there a is there a chat with questions that i can answer or um i i think the the best foot forward here would be to continue the conversation in discord i know people are going to be having questions from all the presentations today and i i want to thank you for your willingness to do that if that's all right with you i think they could also reach out to you given the contact information that you had just posted we are expecting probably i'm going to say close to 100 100 plus projects coming out of this event i know i can speak for a lot of the hackers and that they will be quite interested in finding grants and other funding options following the event so i want to i want to thank you for for your presentation and thank you for your time explaining that it's a great way to close out an event a lot of enthusiasm uh for the builders fantastic well thanks for having me here it's great to be here uh for the builders it's just one of two words non-dilutive um thank you very much all right we're going to be taking things offline from here unless you have any further comments um more than welcome to um i think that's it for me i will hop into the discord and along with my friends at five point in ipfs we'll try to answer any questions that people have all right thank you so much and i want to thank everyone for joining us today for the ipfs and file biocoin builders day summit uh thank you to all the speakers and thank you to the rest of the youth global team for making this happen um i think we're all impressed by how things went today and excited to see what comes out of the next three weeks of hacks and summits don't forget we do have a hackathon sorry we do have a summit coming up again next week uh join us right here on each global.tv and don't miss a moment of the action but other than that happy hacking we're looking forward to seeing what you can build any questions comments or concerns throw it in the discord and we'll help you out