Discover Current and Past FFDW Project Partners

Promote blockchain technology’s potential to benefit all members of society by educating stakeholders, conducting research and developing policies on, and building community support for blockchain technologies. A “train the trainer” blockchain education program for community college professors and CA government staff.

FFDW supports the Movement for a Better Internet, a collaborative effort to ensure the future of the internet is grounded in public interest values. The movement brings people together to ensure the next generation of the web is better for people everywhere.

As we pursue our goal of supporting an internet for everyone, it is imperative that we best understand how people around the world use the internet. To help us with this understanding, Connect Humanity implemented a series of global surveys through a network of thousands of community-focused organizations to pull down data on how their communities rely on, benefit from, and want to see on the internet.

The Decentralized Future Council (DFC) was a collaboration between the Internet Education Foundation and FFDW. DFC raised awareness for the larger ecosystem of new technologies, from blockchain to decentralized storage and DNS, and worked to educate policymakers about new and upcoming challenges that correspond with these emerging technologies, including privacy, security, democracy, online trust and safety, and more.

Together, DPLA's partners hold 50 million items that represent our nation’s cultural heritage—photographs, videos, books, news footage, oral histories, letters, artwork, government documents, and much more. Storing this information on Filecoin would increase public access while providing an extra layer of protection against loss of access due to changes in institutional budgets, priorities, or technology. Bridging between DPLA's partners and emerging technologies is a familiar role for DPLA. To bridge DPLA partners to Filecoin, this collaboration will yield a pilot project that preserves a portion of one of DPLA partners’ collections on Filecoin for a trial period and share the results with their community.

Distributed Press is an initiative to build an open source, no-code publishing tool for the World Wide Web and DWeb to empower authors and amplify free expression worldwide. A collaboration with Hypha and Sutty co-operatives, the tool takes DWeb-native publications mainstream as a reliable end-to-end DWeb publishing platform, enabling all creators to publish to the DWeb. New technical features of Distributed Press are showcased in COMPOST, a magazine centering stories about the digital commons.

In partnership with researchers from the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, the Initiative ensures that large geospatial datasets are accessible to research organizations and the general public. This collaboration with FFDW helps the Initiative develop the capacity and infrastructure for uploading, analyzing, and extracting large quantities of data using decentralized storage technologies, including Filecoin and IPFS.

EFF is an essential champion of user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development, and has been since their founding in 1990. Their staff of nearly 100—including lawyers, activists, and technologists–works to ensure that our rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our reliance on technology grows worldwide. EFF works on issues at the local, state, federal, and international levels on six main issue areas: free speech, digital privacy, creativity and innovation, transparency, international, and security.

Food for Crisis, a joint initiative between Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) Giving and World Food Programme (WFP) Innovation Accelerator, ensures efficiency and transparency of humanitarian aid through blockchain technology. This project aims to trace funds from donation to beneficiary, relying on blockchain and decentralized storage (the Filecoin/IPFS system). This will provide real-time visibility into fund flows, while protecting privacy, and providing agency for donors to better view the impact of their contributions. A differentiating factor is the ability to trace both crypto and non-crypto funds, which would be represented as digital twins on a blockchain. Food for Crisis will integrate with local payment systems (e.g., traditional bank transfers, e-vouchers, and mobile money).

This multi-year FFDW award supported infrastructure, user experience, and security enhancements for tools used by journalists around the globe. It’s also being used to explore a zero-trust architecture for SecureDrop, an open-source news and information submission system used by newsrooms worldwide for secure document exchange and communication between journalists and anonymous sources. Overall, the award helps to further the FPF’s efforts to preserve historically critical information, such as its comprehensive database of press freedom violations in the United States and government data that belongs in the public sphere.

Gray Area is a 21st-century countercultural hub catalyzing creative action for social transformation with a mission to cultivate, sustain, and amplify a community of creative practitioners who apply antidisciplinary practice at the intersection of art and technology towards engaging with the complex challenges facing our world. Our collaboration supports the development of DWeb curriculum for the Gray Area Learn online arts education platform with new course tracks that will empower creators to incorporate DWeb technology into their creative practices.

This project between FFDW and the Guardian Project is aimed at breaking down the notion that centralization is a necessary requirement for providing meaningful security and authentication for content veracity and distribution. It incorporates decentralized storage and communication technology into ProofMode, a system that enables authentication and verification of multimedia content captured on smartphones and is leveraged by human rights organizations across the globe. This project also accelerates the adoption of decentralized storage technology for F-Droid, the leading free and open-source app publishing platform.