V6A
V6A is interested in strange and consequential ideas, especially those that arrive before the institutions needed to understand or support them do. We fund early experiments, help promising work find its next form, and study what allows ideas to survive long enough to become new capabilities.
Like many funds, we are on the lookout for promising work, much of which is overlooked because it’s considered too early, unusual, or transdisciplinary to be supported by existing capital and institutions.
However, unlike traditional philanthropy we are most interested in the after. What are the missing conditions and pathways through which ideas become societal capabilities?
We do not believe there is any shortage of good ideas in the world. Our reason for being lies in the observation that society produces more worthwhile ideas than it currently has the capacity to carry and meaningfully integrate. Our hypothesis is that the bottleneck to progress lies in failures of continuity and coordination, specifically the absence of infrastructure that helps ideas survive, adapt, and develop into more durable cultural forms, tools, practices, and capabilities. Many good ideas, whether prototype or pilot, have disappeared after an initial burst of attention and support. We believe this failure is not a reflection of the idea itself, but of due to the conditions and infrastructure that would support their continuity never being formed or encouraged to.
V6A studies and intervenes in this gap through applied R&D and grant-making. We keep encountering ideas whose trajectories cannot be explained by their quality alone. We want to follow those trajectories, test what changes them, and learn what kinds of support become possible once we stop assuming every idea should follow the same road.
In other words, we are interested in the study and design of metapolicy and the systems through which society encounters, tests, interprets, alters, remembers, contests, and sometimes carried ideas forward with. We see these systems as capability infrastructures that like connective tissues, allows experimentation to compound and accumulate into usable tools and cultural understanding rather than dissipate their efforts.
Previously, we operated as an applied studio and built a constellation of projects, collaborators, and funders over 3 years. Our work focused on emerging open-source technologies and privacy-preserving cryptography; both fields that held strange and consequential ideas with the potential to profoundly reshape the world.
Our role was to bridge the gap between these technologies and meaningful implementation despite their overton windows still coming into view. We brought together diverse sectors and expertise, from public to private to civic to do so.
The next iteration of V6A is now taking shape.
Our purpose is to widen the range of futures society is capable of holding and sustaining. We do so through specialized funds for defined areas of opportunity, exploratory grants for work that does not yet fit an established category, and applied research that helps promising ideas move beyond discovery into a viable next stage.
Through a initial portfolio of applied projects and exploratory grants, we are developing a practical body of knowledge about how societies recognize, sustain, and integrate new ideas. We call the systems that perform this work capability infrastructure. V6A’s long-term purpose is to make experimentation more cumulative. We’d liek to see a wider range of ieas and tools society can draw upon to meet the challenges and opportunities of our time.
What futures would you like to see?
rithikha@v6acolab.org