The vehicle, the staging, and what your capital actually builds.
Weave is the convergence requirement for community digital trust. It is both a financial backbone — coordinating capital across a movement caught in a pre-scaling trap — and a technology backbone that the movement's infrastructure depends on. This page explains how it came together, where we are, and how the capital architecture works.
How Project Weave came together
Kevin Triplett had been funding values-aligned technology projects for more than two years — builders working on community-owned technology, data sovereignty, and regenerative infrastructure. He saw the value in this network of projects. He also saw what was missing: a strategy to weave them together, to fund adoption of shared protocols, commission the missing pieces, and turn aligned projects into shared infrastructure.
When he met Kaliya Young on a Community Technology Alliance call, she put forward a novel lift-off strategy for this values-aligned work: taking a page from how the internet itself was created. In the 1960s, the US government funded sixteen computer labs and incentivized them to write protocols so their computers could communicate with each other. That convergence requirement — not the funding alone — created the internet rather than sixteen incompatible networks. They decided to work together to apply the same model to community trust infrastructure: fund a cohort of builders and make interoperability on shared protocols a condition of the work.
Kevin has funded the baseline work, the team, the interviews, the strategy development — everything described on this site happened because Kevin put his own capital behind it before asking anyone else to. You are not being asked to take the first bet. Kevin already took it. The invitation is to join him.
Where we are now
We have spent the past year in direct conversation with the frontline builders of trust infrastructure. We have conducted in-depth interviews with eleven projects building on or adjacent to the emerging protocol stack, and identified more than a dozen more that are values-aligned and could become adopters. These are not theoretical targets on a spreadsheet. They are real teams with real codebases, real communities, and real needs — and we know what each one requires to integrate with shared protocols because we've sat with them and listened.
Alongside this, the First Person Project (FPP) stack — the personhood credential infrastructure at the center of Weave's protocol work — has developed its own momentum. FPP is the most mature element of the trust layer, with active development, standards engagement, and growing community interest. It is the anchor that the rest of the stack connects to.
The projects we've interviewed and identified map directly to Weave's capital streams:
- Many are ready for protocol implementation contracts — they need resources and technical support to integrate shared credentials into their existing tools.
- Several are working on the groups-as-first-class problem — the protocol design work that makes communities, not just individuals, protocol-level actors.
- All of them need a pathway to values-aligned capital — a way to pitch and access non-extractive funding that doesn't force them into extractive business models to survive.
The movements we aim to serve
The trust protocols Weave coordinates are not an end in themselves. They are infrastructure for movements that need them:
Democracy and civic tech — organisations building tools for deliberation, participatory governance, and community decision-making. They have the community relationships and the governance design expertise. What they lack is the trust substrate underneath — personhood verification, portable community credentials, group standing at the protocol level. With shared protocols, their tools become interoperable, their communities become portable, and their work survives platform risk.
Indigenous data sovereignty — communities and networks building governance frameworks for indigenous-controlled data, identity, and knowledge systems. This is not an add-on to Weave's work; it is a boundary condition that tests whether the protocols actually serve communities on their own terms. Personhood credentials, group protocols, data governance for sovereign data systems, trust bridges between systems that are explicit, not implicit.
Bioregional regeneration — place-based communities organising around watersheds, food systems, local economies, and ecological stewardship. What these communities need is an underlying substrate of relationality, accountability, and collective sense-making that goes all the way down to the neighbourhood level. That substrate is what Weave's protocols provide.
These movements already exist. They already have builders, communities, and momentum. What they don't have is shared trust infrastructure. Weave seeds the field with protocols these movements can build on.
A financial backbone — and a technology backbone
The systemic investing field has independently diagnosed the gap Weave fills. A major field-mapping initiative (the Systemic Investing Field Mapping, or SIFM) conducted forty-two interviews across the movement and validated findings across two workshops. Their conclusions:
The movement is caught in a pre-scaling trap. Field-building infrastructure and capital flows each need the other to grow, but both are below the critical threshold needed to trigger momentum.
The missing layer is what they call the "meso" — the root systems and mycelial networks beneath the visible trees. Backbones, weavers, coordination infrastructure. Chronically underfunded because funders prefer visible trees over invisible root systems.
The field explicitly needs four to five new "financial backbones" — entities that orchestrate capital coordination rather than building projects or deploying capital directly. This is not one author's recommendation. It is a finding from the field itself.
Weave fills that role. But Weave goes further.
The movements working toward regenerative economies, community resilience, democratic renewal, and indigenous sovereignty all need more than coordinated capital. They need shared technology infrastructure — trust protocols, identity verification, group coordination tools, secure communication — that no single movement or organisation can build alone.
This infrastructure cannot come from big tech. The platforms that currently mediate community life are designed to extract value, not to serve communities. Their business models depend on surveillance, attention capture, and data brokerage. Even well-intentioned corporate infrastructure creates dependency — and dependency is the opposite of community sovereignty.
If we are serious about systemic change, the technology backbone of that change must be community-owned, open-protocol, and designed to serve the people who use it rather than the companies that built it. Protocols are public goods. Platforms are private property.
Weave builds the technology backbone for the entire movement. A financial backbone coordinates capital. A technology backbone provides the rails that capital, trust, coordination, and governance all flow on. Weave is both.
The capital architecture: six streams
The capital architecture is not a single grant pool. It is six concurrent streams, each serving a different function in building the trust substrate. The streams run in parallel, not in sequence — each one makes the others more powerful.
Stabilise the builders already in flight.
The people building this infrastructure are already doing the work — embedded in their communities, building ahead of the market, self-funding at the expense of their own stability. Their instability is not a personal failing; it is a market failure. The market hasn't caught up to what they're building.
Peer-nominated, self-named stipends that depreciate over eighteen months as their work becomes self-sustaining. The fellows are the initial cohort — stabilising them is how the cohort forms, and the demonstrated collaboration they produce is the evidence that justifies every other stream.
Stream A is the most immediately fundable — it is the size of commitment that moves on trust in people, not institutional due diligence of a multi-year arc. It breaks the cold start.
Build the substrate.
Contracts — not grants — to projects adopting shared credentials and trust protocols. Each contract funds real integration work: credential issuance, verification flows, user experience, testing. Final payment conditional on passing shared interoperability tests. The convergence model, applied.
This is how the protocol substrate gets built — not by one team in one lab, but by many teams converging on shared infrastructure because the funding requires it. The projects identified in our baseline work are the pipeline for Stream B.
Build the missing protocol layer.
A dedicated cohort of protocol developers and community-design experts contracted to work together on making groups a first-class object in the protocol stack — the "we" layer that doesn't yet exist anywhere.
Today, every identity system treats the individual as primary and groups as sets-of-individuals. But the actual unit of community action is the group — the neighbourhood, the cooperative, the watershed council. Making groups a protocol primitive is the most novel and most important piece of the stack. The deliverables are concrete: protocol spec, reference implementation, interop test suite, standards-body submission.
Non-exploitative and non-extractive growth capital.
Inspired by the Zebra funding model, the Canal Funds fills a gap in the current funding landscape. Right now, values-oriented technology entrepreneurs face an impossible choice. Small philanthropic grants for civil society tech don't provide enough runway for real business development. Venture capital writes large checks — but requires a major liquidity event, demands moats, and could care less about standards, trust networks, or interoperability. The VC model is structurally hostile to what these builders are building.
The Canal Funds sits in the middle. A separate financial entity deploying values-aligned, protocol-aligned capital to tech companies building on the shared protocols. "What are your canals?" (or protocols that let people and groups connect freely without lock-in), not "what's your moat?" — the value comes from interoperability, not capture. Returns are reasonable — in the range of 5–20% — but they are not exploitative, and they are de-risked by the protocols-not-platforms strategy: portfolio companies' value comes from interoperability, not lock-in. The protocol substrate itself de-risks the investment because adoption compounds across the ecosystem rather than depending on one company's enclosure.
Two modes within one fund:
- For-return capital — capped, non-extractive investment. Steward ownership, capped returns, exit-to-community structures.
- Rotating capital — capital that circulates through protocol-native companies and communities without expecting return. Deployed, recovered at par, redeployed. The capital stays in the ecosystem.
Streams A–C are philanthropic (grants and contracts through fiscal sponsorship). Stream D is investment capital (separate entity, own fiduciary stewards). The philanthropic side builds and de-risks the commons. The Canal Funds captures aligned, capped upside on top of it. Not controlled by Weave, but thesis-aligned.
Capital flow infrastructure for systemic investing.
This is the big unlock — what becomes possible when the substrate exists at scale.
The backbone of regeneration is long-term land care and stewardship — the neighbourhoods, watersheds, and land-based communities doing the actual work of ecological restoration, food sovereignty, and place-based resilience. These are the people systemic investors want to reach. And systemic investors have innovative mechanisms to reach them — flow funding, cluster models, retroactive public goods funding. What they don't have is a substrate to flow capital through.
Right now, moving capital to a local land stewardship community requires intermediary institutions (each taking overhead), trust built manually per relationship, no way to verify the community is real or stewarding resources well, and no accountability that isn't extractive reporting.
The protocol stack at scale solves all of this. Personhood credentials verify that community members are real people. Groups-as-first-class gives the community protocol-level standing — it can receive, steward, and account for capital as a group. Portable trust lets a funder trust a community they've never met, because communities the funder does trust have vouched for them.
When tens of thousands of neighbourhoods and land stewardship communities are on this substrate, the trust layer becomes the rails that innovative funding mechanisms ride on. Capital flows directly to the people doing the work — at the speed of trust, through protocol-level rails that no intermediary captures.
The technology backbone becomes the financial backbone, at scale.
Infrastructure for capital leaving the extractive economy.
Capital designed to leave the enclosure. The compost metaphor: accumulated capital — sitting in structures that reproduce extraction — composting into living webs of trusted, purpose-driven people and projects.
Distinct from Stream D: the Canal Funds deploy capital that wants to work within the ecosystem (whether for-return or rotating). Stream F is for capital that wants to exit — wealth holders who have decided their capital should leave extractive structures entirely and land in the commons. The trust substrate provides the destination — verified communities, trust-graphed groups, protocol-level accountability without extractive reporting. Stream F is the vehicle; the substrate is where it lands.
At this horizon, Stream F opens up something larger: totally new structures of stewardship and ownership at scale. When the trust substrate makes communities protocol-level actors — capable of receiving, governing, and accounting for capital collectively — it becomes possible to imagine forms of ownership and stewardship that don't exist yet. Land that owns itself, cared for by communities of groups. Resources governed by trust-graphed networks of neighbourhoods. Capital that doesn't just exit extraction but lands in structures designed from the ground up around collective care. This is where the protocol work meets the deepest questions about what comes after the extractive economy.
How the streams relate
Stream A produces the builders who do the work across all other streams. Stream B builds the substrate that Stream D portfolio companies build on. Stream C builds the missing protocol layer that makes communities actors in the system. Stream D provides growth capital for companies building on the substrate. Stream E is the unlock — the substrate becomes the rails for capital flow at scale. Stream F provides the exit ramp for capital leaving the extractive economy.
Streams A–C are philanthropic. Stream D is investment capital. Streams E and F emerge as the substrate matures. Together they are the full capital architecture — polycapital for the polycrisis.
The three-year arc
Year 1: Focused weave with the known cohort. The projects already in the picture — identified through our baseline interviews and relationship-building — are the initial cohort. Year 1 goes deep with these projects, not broad. Deep integration produces the demonstrated result that justifies expansion.
Year 2: Scaling globally. Pilot communities go live across multiple continents. Additional tools commit to the shared protocol stack. Personhood credentials roll out at meaningful scale. A second integration cohort launches. The democracy/civic-tech and indigenous data sovereignty movements begin formal protocol alignment.
Year 3: Ubiquity and resilience. The protocol stack is in active use by ordinary people worldwide. Multiple independent tools run interoperably on shared infrastructure. Place-based community groups have protocol-level standing. Communities — from bioregional networks in Europe to indigenous governance in the Global South to neighbourhood organising in the US — can coordinate on infrastructure they own, that survives political and platform stress.
What Year 1 must demonstrate
The cohort projects integrated with the shared protocol stack and demonstrating functional use — not just specs, working software. Cross-project bridges proving the weave is real: a credential from one project recognised in another, group-issued credentials moving across project boundaries, trust paths spanning the cohort. User experience investment closing the gap with commercial platforms. Coalition coherence among the builders. And a public demonstration showing real communities using real infrastructure — small numbers, real stories, verifiable.
That demonstration is the stage gate. It is what unlocks the next phase of funding — not a report a funder reads, but a moment a funder witnesses.
Why fund a coordinator — not the projects directly?
Because funding many good projects produces many incompatible solutions. Funding many good projects and requiring them to converge on shared protocols produces infrastructure. That is the difference between "a set of projects we funded" and a weave.
A direct grant funds a project to do its own thing well. Weave funds projects to do their own thing well and to interoperate — which is the only way the pieces become shared infrastructure.
Without the convergence layer, you get the predictable failure mode of well-funded fragmentation: ten good projects, each with its own incompatible approach, real value, no commons. The integrations between them never get built because that work benefits everyone and no single project owns it. Weave owns it.
"Aren't other projects already doing this?"
Every project in this space has built sophisticated tools for one piece of the puzzle. None has built the trust layer underneath that makes all the pieces work together.
Ecological credit platforms built real verification and trading infrastructure — but require blockchain wallets and property documentation, structurally excluding the communities doing the stewardship. Their own foundations have had to build workarounds that move away from their blockchain stacks and toward what Weave provides.
Quadratic funding and impact certificates solve allocation mechanics on top of a missing trust layer — so they mostly reach the crypto-literate, can't verify the impact they tokenize, and re-concentrate around new gatekeepers.
Community coordination networks have defined the trust problem perfectly — peer-led verification within tight-knit communities. But manual trust doesn't scale across community boundaries.
Institutional innovation labs and policy organisations work on complementary pieces — institutional design, digital public infrastructure advocacy, protocol governance. Important allies, not competitors. Each assumes the trust substrate exists. It doesn't.
What Weave builds that none of them do: personhood without wallets, community vouching rooted in relationship, groups as first-class protocol objects, and the convergence requirement — fund AND require interoperability. No one else in this space does both.
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