2026-07-10 –, The Seedbed
Float, or the Funding Lab for Open Agroecological Technologies, is at its core a protocol or process designed to get resources directly into the hands of community-led, open agroecological innovators. In this session, participants can expect a deep dive into Float, a space for Q&A.
The Float Stewards will begin with a presentation on what Float is, its goals, and its progress to-date. This will include a brief summary of the successes and learnings of the pilot round, which included over 80 participants and funded 30 initiatives, before a deep dive into the Float protocol.
We will explore how Float values of collaboration, openness, anchoring in agroecology, and play are present throughout the process and how the details of how the protocol will work for upcoming Round 1 of Float!
The Float protocol is built on a three-part thesis:
Surfacing ideas through collaboration: Traditional funding models are top-down, picking winners and losers and flattening the diversity of possible solutions. We believe the people closest to the issues know the challenges best. By bringing diverse practitioners together for deep collaboration, we can co-develop proposals that actually align with community needs.
Shifting decision-making power: Competition for scarce resources fragments communities. Instead of external funders setting agendas, Float creates infrastructure for peers to assess and award resources to each other's ideas. Rather than a simple vote, Float’s decision-making process is designed for meaningful participation, relying on peer-to-peer engagement to reduce fragmentation of efforts while supporting the refinement and improvement of shared proposals.
Assessing impact and building a collective resource: Beyond getting funding to initiatives through a democratic and equitable process, we believe that this approach will lead to better outcomes. The vision for Float is to build mechanisms for the community to assess and demonstrate their impact at the individual project and collective levels, helping us chart the impact of the Float protocol over time. It is through this rigorous, peer-led documentation and honest evaluation that we are building resources to improve Float's adaptability and reproducibility.
Understood this way, Float is a toolbox of modular approaches that can be reconfigured and adapted to specific contexts and communities in order to surface and support local innovation. The outputs of Float are not just technologies; every time Float is implemented, the toolbox expands, and the more it is used, the better it gets.
Anna Lynton is a designer, technologist, and community facilitator. Her work is rooted in supporting community autonomy, local innovation, and tech sovereignty, with roles across the open ag tech ecosystem including with OpenTEAM and the Grassroots Innovations Assembly for Agroecology. As a steward of Float, her work centers on decentralized governance, community-led processes, and advancing the autonomy of food producers.
I run Raft Foundation, an experiment in nonprofit commoning.