The OpenCivics Collaborative Research Round is designed to foster collaboration among researchers and civic innovators to produce open source research & knowledge production that serves community organizers to access the power of web3 and civic innovation. Projects are required to submit as a team or pod which offers an opportunity to experiment with on-chain collaboration and the co-governance of open-source civic engagement research. We’re specifically looking for research initiatives that are exploring the following areas of focus:

• Impact and contribution measurement, reporting, and valuation
• Commons governance, self-organization, and decision-making
• Collaborative knowledge management, learning, and sensemaking
• Open protocols, community templates, and coordination infrastructure
• Community currencies, cooperatives, and alternative economics
• Decentralized project management, roles, and certifications
• Resource allocation, funding mechanisms, and funding sources

Preliminary Proposal

The P2P Foundation is a network of researcher into the impact of peer to peer technologies and commons-based infrastructures on all areas of human society, and with a recent focus on Web3 as a global infrastructure for mutual coordination.

It operates a frequently used wiki at http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net with 25k items related to such practices, observing and recording practices.

Our focus is on observation, documentation and analysis, which means that after intensive collection of the documentation, we also regularly produce synthetic reports (link to publications here). Domains are organized in sections, using mediawiki software, whereby section pages are used as introduction to the complexity of the domain, and each section represents its own encyclopedia.

For example, documentation is organized around the following thematics:

• Impact and contribution measurement, reporting, and valuation, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Accounting
• Commons governance, self-organization, and decision-making, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Peergovernance
• Collaborative knowledge management, learning, and sensemaking, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Intelligence ; https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education
• Open protocols, community templates, and coordination infrastructure, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Standards ; https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Mutual_Coordination
• Community currencies, cooperatives, and alternative economics. https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Money ; https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Credit_Commons
• Decentralized project management, roles, and certifications , N/A
• Resource allocation, funding mechanisms, and funding sources, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Peerfunding

We also have sections on how these functions are applied in specialized domains of activity (Housing, Health, Transportation, etc ..), and pay attention to specific developments in crypto For example, we monitor,

• Developments in crypto governance, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Crypto_Governance
• Developments in the crypto economy, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Crypto_Governance

We believe we can propose the following strategy:

1- A review of the many open source, open design and free software tools that were developed in parallel with the more recent Web3 crypto tools. We propose to produce a synthesis of what the open and commons movements and projects have already achieved, using a combination of synthetic AI and human-produced analysis; we also want to produce overview graphics that can introduce users to achievements and capabilities achieved in a particular domain.

2- An update of this synthesis focused on Web3 updates, improvements and innovations

3- Building technical bridges from our Mediawiki based infrastructure, to Web3 technologies, making a selection of the best material available in new ways, perennialized and protected on a blockchain.

We believe the P2P Foundation, with its fifteen years of experience in documenting the P2P movement, is uniquely suited to be documentary partners of more technically oriented collaborators.