Call for Proposals: Flexible Support for Platform Accountability

Deadline: 10-May-22

Internews is excited to announce a call for proposals for organizations dedicated to improving the governance and accountability of technology platforms worldwide.

In this first public call for proposals under the Platform Impacts Fund (PIF), they are seeking to provide flexible, core funding for organizations, researchers, and advocates who have platform accountability as a central element of their work.

Technology platforms have an enormous and expanding influence over the global and local information ecosystems in which we all live. These platforms offer many clear benefits to the communities who use them—but they also cause and enable substantive harm, while operating with little transparency or accountability to their global users.

The Platform Impacts Fund supports work that seeks to understand and document these impacts, hold platform companies accountable for the role they play, and build networks of understanding around these issues.

The PIF has a global focus, and organizations based outside of America and Europe will be prioritized.

Funding Information

Successful applicants will receive between $10,000 and $30,000 toward ‘core’ or organizational costs which can be spent on staffing, overhead, capacity strengthening, travel, software, hardware, or other expenses. Unlike project-specific funding, these grants are not tied to specific outputs, and are designed to support the overall operations of the recipient organization. This flexible support funding has been identified as both a gap and a priority through stakeholder consultation.

Eligibility Criteria

Organizations working on the following issues should apply:

Researching and documenting the impacts of global technology platforms, particularly within specific contexts outside of the US and Europe
Advocating for specific policy and product reforms
Equity of service, including but not limited to content moderation, for non-European or minority language platform users
Building networks or forums focusing on platform accountability

Successful applicants would ideally be medium to high capacity CSOs already engaged in the platform accountability, digital rights, and tech governance space. These activities should be central to the organization’s mission, and successful grantees should have expertise and a history of impact relating to platform accountability. Applicants without an extensive history who can demonstrate that their work fills a critical gap relating to platform accountability—for example, an underrepresented community or understudied issue—may also apply.

For more information, visit https://internews.org/call-for-proposals-flexible-support-for-platform-accountability/