Our network was formed in October 2019 to bring together like-minded alumni from Ford Foundation, Media Democracy Fund, and Mozilla Foundation fellowship programs. We initially envisioned ourselves as a network that would meet in-person annually, and interact virtually intersessionally, to share, dream, and grow together. But the pandemic forced us to re-think our modalities of engagement. Between 2020 and 2022, we experimented with different forms of virtual engagement and we even launched a Network Fund to award resources to community-led initiatives. We went back to our roots this year, facilitating in-person events to rebuild our community and to understand, post-Covid, who are we? What are our connections? What is special and important about our community?

In June 2023, we hosted a day zero event ahead of RightsCon in San Jose, Costa Rica. We supported the travel of five community members and were joined by other self-funded and/or externally-funded community members. This event concluded with a dinner with our funders. This session was an information exchange focused on understanding what our community is going through and working on. We sought to understand: what work and communities are we supporting? Who are we not supporting, and why? What projects are bringing us joy? What are our individual and collective pain points and opportunities?

In September 2023, alongside the Team Community Feira, we hosted a community dinner in Estoril, Portugal with the generous support of our donor the Media Democracy Fund. This conversation brought together some newer members of our community – individuals who just wrapped up their fellowship programs – so we could help onboard them and understand what their expectations of us are.

In October 2023, alongside the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto, Japan, we hosted an additional community dinner to get input from our members with policy backgrounds as to what collective-visioning conversations we should invest in this coming year. As a community of public interest technologists, politics can affect our work, so horizon scanning of up and coming issues is an important service that we try to offer our members.

In addition, we circulated a newsletter of opportunities to our members every month, and our Steering Committee met virtually twice a month all year. 

We also organized community calls over Zoom, held a virtual Network Fund Showcase to present the work of our 2022 Network Fund recipients to our members, and have spent considerable effort planning ahead for 2024.

In April 2024, we will hold a Strategic Planning Retreat in Marrakech, Morocco that will bring together up to 25 community members, chosen through an open and democratic process, as well as an external facilitator, to help us move forward in evolving the container that holds together this community. The questions we plan to answer in April, and which will guide our activities for the next five years, revolve around five questions: (1) What are future opportunities that we want to move forward together with? (2) How do we support and sustain our global community? (3) How should we allocate the funds available to support and grow our community? (4) How do we grow and expand our available pool of resources? (5) What is this community’s role in the larger public interest and civic technology field, which is attracting increasing interest from policymakers, academia, the philanthropic community, and civil society more broadly? 

Thanks for your support in 2023. We’re excited for 2024, and we will continue to keep you abreast of our plans and strategy as our community develops it.