About Float
Float - the funding lab for open agroecological technologies - is an experiment in community-led innovation prioritization and resource allocation that seeks to bridge the experience and expertise of agroecological farmers, technologists, researchers, and civil society to generate collective commons*.
Stewarded by 11th Hour Project and Raft Foundation, Float grew out of a series of convenings with partners OpenTEAM, TIFS, DWeb, NADAWG, and GOAT. These convenings explored crosscutting issues and opportunities of technology in agriculture, including:
Civil society movements efforts to resist the industrial status quo of conventional agriculture technology and the growing risks of emerging innovation to further entrench this inequitable and unsustainable system.
Intersections between decentralized tech, tech sovereignty and civil tech movements with those of food sovereignty, grassroots agroecological innovation, and open source ag tech communities.
Emerging shared priorities and efforts of open ag tech communities looking to drive more ecosystem collaboration and sustainable models that can go head to head with industrial incumbents.
Explorations of participatory and democratic funding models and community resource governance processes that can support more equitable and effective development of technology for agroecology.
In collaboration with partners across the ecosystem, 11th Hour Project and Raft Foundation are leading a pilot funding round that aims to prototype models for resourcing tech development in agriculture that are responsive to the themes, issues, and ideas that surfaced over the course of these convenings.
Practicing commoning in action
“Commons are not standardized machines that can be built from the same blueprint. They are living systems that evolve, adapt over time, and surprise us with their creativity and scope.”
— Silke Helfrich & David Bollier
*
Guiding values
Float aims to build towards protocols/patterns that embody its values and embraces an emergent process that evolves and adapts as the community shapes it.
Collaboration: Collaboration is central to Float's approach, fostering interconnectedness and shared goals across scales* while recognizing the value of competition and different approaches/pathways that support collective benefit.
Openness: Openness enables adaptation and supports diverse modes of participation by ensuring transparency and accountability in processes and information sharing, along with a willingness to embrace new ideas, name and address power dynamics, and meaningfully engage with feedback throughout the process.
Anchored in agroecology*: Agroecology means rigorously embracing the social, economic, and political dimensions of agriculture, requiring a holistic evaluation of a project's impact across scales, rather than focusing on simple metrics like production optimization or efficiency.
Play: Play encourages embracing "good enough for now, safe enough to try" approaches, embracing risk without being reckless. Through play we are fostering curiosity and accepting unexpected or "negative" results as valuable learning outcomes within a safe and adaptable container. By centering play we hope to create a space of open experimentation and conditions that lower the stakes for participation and create opportunities for engagement at different levels.
Agrocecology: Again, thinking across scales and impact from the local to systemic - see Gliessman’s levels of agroecological transformation.
Scales: By scales we mean the project, the farm, the community, the territory, the ecosystem, and beyond. In other words, we recognize that systems are nested and that change in one part impacts the whole.
*
Strategic goals
Float's goals are designed as a nested strategy to generate collective commons that work across different time horizons and scales, aiming to catalyze impactful, real world projects and collaborations, build stronger community and relationships across the ecosystem, and prototype reproducible protocols and patterns for broader community use and expansion.
Catalyze impactful, real-world projects and initiatives: Float aims to democratically fund impactful projects that strengthen the ecosystem and support a more resilient, regenerative agroecological field, ensuring the innovations are rooted in needs articulated by community.
Support the ecosystem, deepen relations, and bridge movements and initiatives: The second goal is to bring projects and practitioners into closer relationships, fostering new ways of engaging, and driving more collaboration within the ecosystem - especially through the practice of working together with shared financial resources to cultivate stronger ties, trust, accountability, and community momentum.
Develop protocols and patterns that can be remixed and reproduced: Finally, Float seeks to develop reproducible protocols and broader patterns for participatory resource allocation that can be learned from and re-implemented by others in the future, creating pathways for community governance and opportunities for further experimentation.
The team behind Float
Float "Round 0" is being stewarded by:
Anna Lynton - Grassroots Innovation Assembly for Agroecology
Nathan Hewitt - Raft Foundation
Rithikha Rajamohan - V6A Labs
Samuel Oslund - 11th Hour Project
Float's inaugural committee is:
Ankita Raturi, Purdue University & Gathering for Open Ag Tech
Dana Perls, Friends of the Earth
Darryl Wong, UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology
Dianna Zeegers, Big Green DAO
Dorn Cox, OpenTEAM / Farm Hack
Richard Ng, IndigiDAO / New Mexico Community Capital
Wendy Hanamura, Dweb / Internet Archive
Additional attribution and acknowledgment
In addition to the inaugural committee, we'd like to acknowledge Madelynn Martinier, Pat Connoly, and Joseph Gubbels for their ongoing advisory support, as well as the No Regrets Initiative and CS Fund for supporting with convening efforts. We owe a great deal of thanks to many people and initiatives beyond this, and it would be difficult to track the invaluable contributions, ideas, and efforts that have influenced Float. In 2024 alone approximately 300 people/organizations participated in the different gatherings. In addition, Float draws on, and is beneficiary of, the ideas and work of the broader open source ag-tech ecosystem, food justice organizing, commons scholars, farmers and food systems workers, hackers, and you!
Questions? Reach out to us at contact@float.ag
About Float
Float - the funding lab for open agroecological technologies - is an experiment in community-led innovation prioritization and resource allocation that seeks to bridge the experience and expertise of agroecological farmers, technologists, researchers, and civil society to generate collective commons*.
Stewarded by 11th Hour Project and RAFT Foundation, Float grew out of a series of convenings with partners OpenTEAM, TIFS, DWeb, NADAWG, and GOAT. These convenings explored crosscutting issues and opportunities of technology in agriculture, including:
Civil society movements efforts to resist the industrial status quo of conventional agriculture technology and the growing risks of emerging innovation to further entrench this inequitable and unsustainable system.
Intersections between decentralized tech, tech sovereignty and civil tech movements with those of food sovereignty, grassroots agroecological innovation, and open source ag tech communities.
Emerging shared priorities and efforts of open ag tech communities looking to drive more ecosystem collaboration and sustainable models that can go head to head with industrial incumbents.
Explorations of participatory and democratic funding models and community resource governance processes that can support more equitable and effective development of technology for agroecology.
In collaboration with partners across the ecosystem, 11th Hour Project and Raft Foundation are leading a pilot funding round that aims to prototype models for resourcing tech development in agriculture that are responsive to the themes, issues, and ideas that surfaced over the course of these convenings.
Guiding values
Float aims to build towards protocols/patterns that embody its values and embraces an emergent process that evolves and adapts as the community shapes it.
Collaboration: Collaboration is central to Float's approach, fostering interconnectedness and shared goals across scales - by which we mean the project, the community, the territory, the ecosystem - while recognizing the value of competition and different approaches/pathways that support collective benefit.
Openness: Openness enables adaptation and supports diverse modes of participation by ensuring transparency and accountability in processes and information sharing, along with a willingness to embrace new ideas, name and address power dynamics, and meaningfully engage with feedback throughout the process.
Anchored in agroecology: Agroecology means rigorously embracing the social, economic, and political dimensions of agriculture, requiring a holistic evaluation of a project's impact across scales, rather than focusing on simple metrics like production optimization or efficiency.
Play: Play encourages embracing "good enough for now, safe enough to try" approaches, embracing risk without being reckless. Through play we are fostering curiosity and accepting unexpected or "negative" results as valuable learning outcomes within a safe and adaptable container. By centering play we hope to create a space of open experimentation and conditions that lower the stakes for participation and create opportunities for engagement at different levels.
Agrocecology: Again, thinking across scales and impact from the local to systemic - see Gliessman’s levels of agroecological transformation.
Scales: By scales we mean the project, the farm, the community, the territory, the ecosystem, and beyond. In other words, we recognize that systems are nested and that change in one part impacts the whole.
*
Strategic goals
Float's goals are designed as a nested strategy to generate collective commons that work across different time horizons and scales, aiming to catalyze impactful, real world projects and collaborations, build stronger community and relationships across the ecosystem, and prototype reproducible protocols and patterns for broader community use and expansion.
Catalyze impactful, real-world projects and initiatives: Float aims to democratically fund impactful projects that strengthen the ecosystem and support a more resilient, regenerative agroecological field, ensuring the innovations are rooted in needs articulated by community.
Support the ecosystem, deepen relations, and bridge movements and initiatives: The second goal is to bring projects and practitioners into closer relationships, fostering new ways of engaging, and driving more collaboration within the ecosystem - especially through the practice of working together with shared financial resources to cultivate stronger ties, trust, accountability, and community momentum.
Develop protocols and patterns that can be remixed and reproduced: Finally, Float seeks to develop reproducible protocols and broader patterns for participatory resource allocation that can be learned from and re-implemented by others in the future, creating pathways for community governance and opportunities for further experimentation.
The team behind Float
Float round 0 is being stewarded by:
Anna Lynton - Grassroots Innovation Assembly for Agroecology
Nathan Hewitt - Raft Foundation
Rithikha Rajamohan - V6A Labs
Samuel Oslund - 11th Hour Project
Float's inaugural committee is:
Ankita Raturi, Purdue University & Gathering for Open Ag Tech
Dana Perls, Friends of the Earth
Darryl Wong, UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology
Dianna Zeegers, Big Green DAO
Dorn Cox, OpenTEAM / Farm Hack
Richard Ng, IndigiDAO / New Mexico Community Capital
Wendy Hanamura, Dweb / Internet Archive
Additional attribution and acknowledgment
In addition to the inaugural committee, we'd like to acknowledge Madelynn Martinier, Pat Connoly, and Joseph Gubbels for their ongoing advisory support, as well as the No Regrets Initiative and CS Fund for supporting with convening efforts. We owe a great deal of thanks to many people and initiatives beyond this, and it would be difficult to track the invaluable contributions, ideas, and efforts that have influenced Float. In 2024 alone approximately 300 people/organizations participated in the different gatherings. In addition, Float draws on, and is beneficiary of, the ideas and work of the broader open source ag-tech ecosystem, food justice organizing, commons scholars, farmers and food systems workers, hackers, and you!
Questions? Reach out to us at float@raft.foundation