The problem with #openweb funding isn’t simply rejection, waiting for decisions, or whether one particular project gets funded. The problem is #KISS structural, after 30+ years working through grassroots projects, funded and unfunded, there is a repeated pattern that is easy to see – useful social and grassroots technology gets filtered through a narrow technical understanding of what counts as a “good” #openweb project.
This is the #geekproblem, not moral judgement of individuals – it isn’t about individual geeks being bad people. Many people working in open technology have good intentions and genuinely care about the commons. The problem is what happens when a technical culture becomes the dominant way of seeing the problem. The technology gets analysed, the code gets analysed, the architecture gets analysed. But the social system the technology is supposed to serve is almost invisible.
So the question we need to keep asking is can open technology funding engage with the social problem that are embedded in the technical problem? Because if a grassroots project has to become sufficiently polished, technically framed and institutionally legible before the funding system can in anyway understand it, then we’ve already created a barrier between the funding system and the communities it is supposed to support.
And this isn’t solved by simply hiring better grant writers or getting an AI to produce better applications, that #KISS risks making the filtering system better at filtering. We need to ask whether the frame itself is too narrow, as the #openweb isn’t just software, it is people, communities, trust, media, governance, culture and the social relationships around the technology.
If we fund only the technical layer, we shouldn’t be surprised when the social layer remains broken. This is why #OMN keeps coming back to the #4opens, grassroots participation and trust, we need to move beyond the #geekproblem without throwing the geeks out. We need the technical knowledge and the social knowledge, to compost this mess rather than simply build another layer of #techshit on top of it.
