Help build the finance layer of the Bioregional Knowledge Commons!

Help build the finance layer of the Bioregional Knowledge Commons!

Teams doing landscape-scale organizing are stretched thin. They're building new finance instruments without established models, coordinating stakeholders who've never worked together, often holding field-level strategy and day-to-day operations in the same small group of people. Learning from what others have tried gets crowded out by everything else they're carrying. And the knowledge is out there: dozens of real attempts at bioregional financing across Europe and the Americas, some successful, some instructive in their failure, collectively representing years of hard-won understanding about what it actually takes to move capital at bioregional scale.

Too much of that knowledge stays where it landed. It lives in reports that aren't connected to each other, in strategy documents that are hard to find, in practitioner memory that struggles to travel across language or geography. The result is expensive reinvention — and slower progress than the field can afford. We built the Bioregional Knowledge Commons at bioregioning.earth — 100+ organization profiles, 59 case studies, a shared ontology — to change that. A scaffold where knowledge can actually be found, compared, and applied by a team working in a different territory with different conditions. We know what's missing because we're practitioners too — coordinating financial strategy for European bioregions with Bioregional Weaving Labs, working with rural Catalan cooperatives, asking questions the field has answered but not organized.

This project extends the Commons into finance — synthesizing what teams have actually done designing their financial strategies, mapping it into structured, comparable knowledge, and packaging it so any team can draw on the field's collective knowledge as a starting point for their own strategy — through direct exploration, AI-assisted research, or working with others who know the material. Your support makes the field's hard-won knowledge available to the teams who need it most.

Project scope

The Bioregional Knowledge Commons at bioregioning.earth is an already-live open library of 59 case studies, 57 organization profiles, and a shared ontology, made for bioregional regenerators worldwide to learn from other contexts and adapt practices locally. Bioregional finance has generated important knowledge — but scattered and unstructured, it stays hard to find and harder to build on. Expanding the Knowledge Commons means doing the structuring work the field still lacks: taking what already exists across reports, strategy documents, and years of practice on the ground, and mapping it so key knowledge becomes easy to discover, understand, and reuse. Starting with regenerative and bioregional finance, this project synthesizes and maps that existing knowledge into the Commons — visible and browsable on the website — and packages it so teams can take the next step: drafting a bioregional finance strategy.

What we're building

We will draw on the documentation that already exists — reports, strategy papers, case write-ups, and the structuring work done on bioregional financial facilities (BFFs) across Europe — and synthesize it into the Knowledge Commons. That means case profiles, frameworks, mechanisms, and governance models woven into the existing BKC ontology as conceptual maps, so relationships and patterns become visible and comparable across territories. Practitioner perspectives will enrich the synthesis where the written record is thin.

This is not a one-time publish. The Knowledge Commons is designed to grow over time — new sources mapped, frameworks refined, interfaces improved — and this project establishes the finance module as a living layer that can expand with further funding, practitioner contribution, and peer networks.

At full funding, all of this lives on bioregioning.earth: browsable profiles, conceptual maps with new interface designs to navigate them, and the expanded ontology — alongside a downloadable, AI-ready knowledge package — structured context, prompts, and a guided workflow practitioners can plug into whatever tools they already use (ChatGPT, Claude, local models, etc.). They add their own bioregional or organizational context — documents, notes, stakeholder maps — and the package gives AI enough structure to do the heavy lifting on secondary research: surfacing comparable experiences, relevant frameworks, and the questions a strategy process needs to ask. From there, a team can work toward a custom draft of a bioregional finance strategy.

Why this matters now

The work grows directly out of what we are doing in Europe. Andrea Farias coordinates financial strategy for the Altiplano Estepario (Spain) within Commonland and the Iberian Network of Regenerative Territories, and works with Bioregional Weaving Labs to structure, map, and communicate portfolios across 6+ bioregions in Europe. ReFi Barcelona collaborates with Miceli Social, a cooperative network in rural Catalonia already engaged in bioregional finance (including via Regenerant Catalunya) and other emerging efforts in the same direction.

We know the gap from our own work: teams need more than inspiration from other bioregions — they need what the field has already produced organized, connected, and ready to apply to their own place. The emergence of agentic AI systems makes this more and more possible: practitioners who are already stretched thin can use these tools to amplify their knowledge and accelerate their work — but only if the field's knowledge is structured well enough to be useful. This project makes that possible for bioregional finance.

How practitioners use it

• Explore and learn on bioregioning.earth — browse finance case profiles, frameworks, conceptual maps, and the expanded ontology.
• Download the AI-ready package from the Knowledge Commons — structured knowledge export, prompt library, and workflow guide designed to work with any AI tool.
• Add your own context — your bioregion's documents, goals, network, constraints.
• Run the workflow — AI-assisted secondary research: comparable cases, relevant mechanisms, governance patterns, open questions.
• Draft and refine — produce a strategy draft (or briefing, comparison note, worksheet) your team and advisors review and own.

The Knowledge Commons grows; your strategy process gets a head start.

The team

All delivery work is carried out by the three-person ReFi Barcelona team at $35/hr. r3.0 contributes in-kind advisory throughout (knowledge sovereignty, consent protocols, alignment with the broader BKC) — roughly two hours per month, not billed to the grant.

• Andrea Farias — Program Design & Research Lead: knowledge mapping design, synthesis of existing BFF documentation and European finance work, framework and case production; field experience from Altiplano financial strategy coordination.
• Luiz Fernando — Strategy & Technical Lead: ontology expansion, KC interface development and website integration on bioregioning.earth, AI-ready knowledge package architecture, workflow and prompt design.
• Giulio Quarta — Operations, Community & Editorial Lead: research support, workshop organization and user testing, publishing and communications.
• r3.0 — Advisory (in-kind): ongoing guidance on commons framing, consent, and BKC coherence.

Budget — target ask ~$10,000

Item 2 is paid directly to contributors. Items 1, 3–6 are ReFi Barcelona delivery at $35/hr.

Delivery by funding level

Ma Earth matching is $2k–$15k depending on community support. Scope scales by depth of synthesis, website integration, and tooling — not simply by counting profiles. Each tier builds on the last; nothing is wasted if funding grows mid-project.

• $2,000–$4,000: Source and framework mapping from existing BFF documentation; initial conceptual map and synthesis report. Light usage guidance for humans and AI — no full package, not yet on the website.
• $4,000–$7,000: Mapped knowledge integrated on bioregioning.earth (simple format). Downloadable AI-ready package at MVP scope. Initial communications to relevant networks.
• $8,000–$10,000: Full scope — richer synthesis, map interfaces, complete AI-ready package, workshops, publishing, replication guide.
• $10,000–$15,000: All of the above plus deeper research; if mature enough, begin governance as the next Commons layer.

Timeline (from September 2026)

• Sep–Oct 2026: Source mapping; synthesize BFF documentation; practitioner input where needed.
• Oct–Dec 2026: Integrate first finance profiles on bioregioning.earth; deploy map interfaces.
• Nov–Dec 2026: AI-ready knowledge package (MVP).
• Dec 2026–Jan 2027: Practitioner workshops; user feedback.
• Jan–Feb 2027: Remaining profiles integrated; package refined.
• Mar 2027: Final report — profiles live, package documented, replication guide.

What success looks like (at full funding ~$10k)

• Finance knowledge mapped and structured in the BKC ontology — frameworks, mechanisms, governance patterns, case synthesis, conceptual maps browsable on bioregioning.earth
• Map interfaces live on the Commons — navigable views of how finance pieces connect
• AI-ready knowledge package downloadable: context export, prompt library, workflow guide for drafting a bioregional finance strategy
• Practitioner workshops with networks in our orbit (rural Catalonia cooperatives, European weaving labs)
• Replication guide and a clear path for the module to keep growing

The Bioregional Knowledge Commons is how we make bioregional finance learning travel: structured, comparable, and ready to apply—not trapped in scattered reports or practitioner memory.

With your support, teams can start from the field’s hard-won patterns and move faster toward finance strategies that fit their bioregion’s real conditions. Thanks if you’ll contribute, and don’t hesitate to reach out for any reason!