Colby Thomson

Foresight Institute Microgrants and Conference in Puerto Rico

We're attending Foresight's 2024 Vision Weekend in San Juan Puerto Rico. This year, in addition to a sustaining donation, thanks to our generous donors we were able to sponsor 5 $10k micro-grants for Foresight Community initiatives. Foresight is famous for convening nerds thinking deeply about some

Programs

AI Insurance might be more important than you think

Two of our board members are veterans in both AI and Insurance. A topic often not appreciated by the public and sometimes by regulators themselves is the power of the insurance industry to create helpful or harmful defacto regulation. For the last two years we have been researching the application

Journalism and Election Monitoring in Hybrid Warfare Conflict Zones

We have several initiatives to facilitate funding, oversee grants and support independent journalists in conflict regions where they or their funders can be arrested for performing basic work. For the protection of staff or partner organizations working on these projects and the privacy of donors we generally do not disclose

Grants

Open Source Ecology and Open Building Institute - Open Solar

Many countries are in a housing costs crisis, which is rightly viewed as a building and permitting crisis. In regions like Tokyo, housing costs have fallen to match building costs. Open Source Ecology and the Open Building Institute have designed modular eco-compatible housing tools, including software, cad libraries, and designs

Grants

Hylo - Tools for purpose driven communities

Good Ancestor completed a year end 2x matching grant for funding Hylo.com milestone development, which includes onboarding for some of our ecosystem partners such as Open Source Ecology and the Open Building Institute. Hylo is an open source tool for initiatives to build their own internal social networks, and

Projects

Open Source Hybrid Electric Vehicle Drivetrain

We are currently in the design phase of this project and welcome volunteer participants. Design goals - Create an open design that reduces the cost and increases ease and desirability of retrofitting older vehicles - Plug-in electric drivetrain supporting modern Tesla/NACS compatible plug - Run/charge efficiently on gasoline

Programs

Media initiative with TypeOne Planet

Good Ancestor is announcing a media initiative with Robert and Alexandra from TypeOne Planet to build out our media pipeline and to assist organizations we support in 2025. More details will be forthcoming here.

Grants

"Talk to the City" achieves milestone

"Talk to the City helps large groups of people coordinate by understanding each other better, faster, and in more depth." "...an open-source AI platform that turns large-scale conversations into actionable insights while preserving individual perspectives—from local town halls to national policy discussions." As part of

Programs

Human Rights Foundation - AI Program - 4th year and hiring

Good Ancestor is proud to announce it's 4th year of funding a group of AI fellows to attend the Oslo Freedom Forum. If you are an AI practitioner interested in attending please Contact us, our fellowship covers travel, hotel, and admission to the conference. Also an important announcement,

Grants

WeVote - Annual Report 2024

In addition to helping with the Internet Democracy Project and Talk to the City Projects, WeVote also launched a prototype of a direct democracy website full of open source information as part of their grant. Here are some of their progress metrics taken from their annual report: 1. Launching a

Members only

Grants

Emergency Assistance for select NGO's affected by USAID

Grants Featured

Open Source Urban Housing for the Caribbean using Roman inspired design

The Roman empire in its peak glory had figured out a few things that modernity is still catching up on. Monuments such as the colliseum still stand because of special concrete that we only just now re-discovered how to make. They had also figured out a number of important important

News Featured

Clearer Thinking module on Social Biases Released

Check out their latest learning module release here on social biases called "How Other People Can Make You Irrational". Why do we support Spencer Greenberg and Clearer Thinking? Spencer has for more than a decade been one of our society's most credible and tireless advocates for

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Projects

The Archive - Digital Sovereignty Tools

Members only

Programs

AI and Critical Infrastructure

Paid-members only

Programs

Ecosystems and Agriculture Programs

Grants

Environmental and Ecosystem Grants

Tools and Technology Projects Good Ancestor maintains a small research farm in Vermont where we - Do prototyping for our Eco-Endowment - Perform basic research on polyculture and Regenerative Agriculture - Have made an experimental food forest - Have created a novel geothermal greenhouse prototype We work with Open Source

Paid-members only

Projects

Emergency Communication Satellite Project

Grants

Porobleno Project - Ukraine

Good Ancestor provided seed funding for this Ukranian project The popular science podcast and YouTube channel "Porobleno" is devoted to anthropological research, traditional culture, and magical thinking and their influence on Ukrainian everyday life now. The purpose of the project:  During the last decades, pseudo-knowledge about Ukrainian culture

Grants Featured

Civic, Social and Govtech Grantmaking

Civic and Govtech Development Grants This initiative provides early stage grants and assistance for non-profits working to improve US Democracy, political polarization, sense making, and decision making processes. - Clearer Thinking - co-creation of learning modules on bias and sense making - We Vote Project - Improving US democracy via

Paid-members only

Guide to Setting up a Graphene OS high security phone

Programs

Internet Security advice for persons of interest

Good Ancestor provides pro-bono last mile assistance, security advice, and referrals for security targeted individuals who face nation state actor threats. VIPs we've served include our grantees, donors, and ecosystem partners, former heads of state in exile, human rights activists and their families, AI safety leaders, policy experts,

Grants

Public Editor - A sense making tool released

Goodly Labs has just released Public Editor, a unique way to provide annotation, identifying cognitive biases and manipulations in documents that goes beyond politicized 'fact checking'. Get the Browser Extension: https://tinyurl.com/kejjsbzz Daily Newsfeed: https://newsreader.publiceditor.io/ Feedback form: https://forms.gle/mc8bEkqXH9hh2yvQ7 Good Ancestor

Projects

Internet Democracy Project

The "Internet Democracy Project", is an open source collaborative and secure environment for political and community groups to debate, vote and ally on common principals and leadership, and to gather constituent opinions using modern LLM driven feedback tools. We collaborated with grantees Ideas Beyond Borders and AI Objectives

Grants

Ideas Beyond Borders - Ideas in the middle east

Thanks to our generous donors, Good Ancestor is proud to have provided substantial program funding to Ideas Beyond borders work in the middle east after visiting their offices and work at a refugee camp in northern Iraq. This crucial initiative understands the importance investing in understanding They serve many important