Loomio

Is there an equivalent of funding.json in the Murmurations protocol?

Danyl Strype Tue 20 Oct 2026 12:01PMPublicSeen by 15

The FLOSS Fund in India are doing some amazing work funding Free Code software, from itch-scratching solo projects to world famous ones, without requiring projects to waste valuable developer time writing grant applications. Instead FLOSS Fund ask projects to add a funding.json file to their websites, laying out the details of what their needs are and how to contribute to them, and select grant recipients by reviewing those. Which anyone else who wants to support commons software development can do too.

"Actually, no amount of material resources can enable governments to develop, nurture, and sustain complex, high-quality FOSS projects themselves in the way a community of passionate maintainers can. The incentives, DNA, and motivations simply do not align. Realistically, it is not possible for the idea of tech sovereignty to be rooted in "owning" and creating all technology, especially software, from scratch. There is no way but to participate in the collaborative global FOSS ecosystem.

"Entities both large and small have thoughtfully presented their broad financial requirements aimed at the general public in their funding.json, rather than just publishing namesake entries specifically aimed at FLOSS/fund. This ranges from $5 monthly individual donations to $500K corporate payments to solicitation of funds via support contracts. This is precisely the goal of the manifest. We do not want FLOSS or the fund to have any form of exclusivity; instead, we want to encourage projects to publicly share their financial requirements with the world. Two examples: openstreetmap.org/funding.json and ziglang.org/funding.json."

Is there an equivalent of this in the Murmurations protocol? If so, could it be tweaked to be compatible with the funding.json format?

Oli SBTue 20 Oct 2026 1:09PM

Thanks Danyl, great find. Short answer: there’s no direct equivalent in the Murmurations Library yet, but funding.json is very much in the same spirit (self-published, machine-readable, crawlable), so they should fit together nicely.

A few ideas:

  1. Add a funding_manifest_url field to the Library so any org/project profile can point at its funding.json. No duplication, one source of truth, and aggregators (including CoBot) can follow the link.

  2. Create a funding_schema that mirrors funding.json’s structure (entity, projects, channels, plans). It’s doable, but we’d need to track their spec versions, so I’d only go there if there’s demand to search/filter by funding needs directly.

I’d suggest starting with 1 if others think it’s useful. Does anyone have a project with a funding.json we could test against?