Winning a Mozilla Seed award

Some good news in these gloomy times. I’m excited to announce that we have received a $10,000 USD open source seed award granted by the Mozilla Foundation through Open Collective.

Earlier this year, Darcy participated in a prototype funding contest at FOSDEM. We won thanks to the very good representation of our project by Karen Reilly who explained our project to a panel of experts from the open source community. 

We held off on announcing our win until all the administrative processes made it official. Meanwhile, we will move our project from Patreon to Open Collective. It is an amazing organisation that helps open source collectives like Darcy by managing everything payment, funds and tax related. At the same time, they help us by making all transactions perfectly transparent for everyone else. So if you want to continue to donate to our project, please do so via Open Collective at:

How are we going to use these funds? The plan is to develop the IBEX prototype  into a more stable and usable system. We will address the main pain points:

  • An end-user friendly onboarding experience, which includes setting all the correct permissions on your Solid Pod, and maybe even creating the pod for you.
  • Moving the friend/contact handling into the Darcy interface, instead of relying on the Solid pod UI.
  • A robust basic blocking / spam protection functionality
  • Much better loading speed & error handling
  • Some sort of search and discovery mechanism
  • Nail down the schema for storing data on the Solid pod
So, watch out for the next big iteration of IBEX! Our Devs will hopefully be able to find the time for this starting next week.