Jonas Öberg

So, what's the big idea?

Jonas founded Commons Machinery, an exploration of the importance of proper attribution in providing recognition and context to openly licensed resources. He built the technology needed to make it easier to openly and persistently associate the provenance of a digital work with the work itself.

Specifically, he developed the Elog.io project, an infrastructure for conveying provenance for any type of digital work, and demonstrated how this could be used with plugins within a browser environment. Most importantly, he conveyed to the community the importance of attribution and how knowing where a work comes from changes the meaning and value of it.

We invested in Jonas’ work because knowing the context in which a creative work was created, is key to understanding its true meaning and cultural value. To help us maintain a link to this context, we need tools to make it effortless to do so.

Jonas Öberg's flash grant nominations

Twice a year we award a number of small grants to a collection of social change agents, no strings attached, in support of their work. We call these Flash Grants and recipients are selected based on nominations from our Fellows. Each award is worth $5,000.

Spend breakdown

At the heart of our co-investment fellowship model is the principle that Fellows continue to invest in their own ideas. The Foundation amplifies the Fellow’s investment by matching it at least tenfold, along with covering the cost of their time for the year.

The figures you see here do not reflect each Fellow’s fellowship year funding, but rather the funds unlocked within each calendar year, as the fellowship years start either March or September and Fellows are not required to spend the available funds proportionately throughout the year.