Open Arsenal

Turn Important Questions Into Investigations.

Public Venture is an open source public-interest funding specification designed to turn important questions into investigations, research, projects, and other missions that serve the public interest. It creates a structured way for individuals, businesses, foundations, universities, governments, nonprofits, and communities to sponsor a clearly defined mission without purchasing control over its outcome. The model can support investigative journalism, scientific research, civic investigations, public audits, infrastructure initiatives, education, economic development, and other work that may be difficult to fund through conventional commercial models. Existing public-interest journalism has demonstrated the need for diverse funding models, particularly because investigative work can require substantial time and resources.

The defining principle of Public Venture is “You may sponsor the question. You may not purchase the answer.” Sponsors select and fund missions, but they cannot dictate findings, conclusions, methodology, publication decisions, or the suppression of unfavorable results. The specification separates financial authority from editorial, investigative, research, and operational authority, creating structural protections against sponsor influence. This approach builds on an important principle already recognized in independent investigative journalism: financial support should not give a funder the right to determine what an independent newsroom publishes.

Public Venture also treats the protection and transparency of capital as core infrastructure rather than an administrative afterthought. Sponsored funds can be placed into independent escrow and maintained under capital-preservation requirements until predefined activation conditions are satisfied. The specification provides for funding thresholds, milestone-based releases, defined holding periods, automatic refunds, investment-earnings attribution, detailed expense records, investment documentation, continuous reconciliation, and an append-only financial history. Every dollar can be traced from sponsor commitment through escrow, investment, earnings, release, expenditure, and final settlement. Public dashboards and machine-readable ledgers can make mission funding, financial activity, sponsors, milestones, deliverables, and audits independently reviewable.

The result is a general-purpose infrastructure for funding important work without compromising its independence. Public Venture can operate as a launchpad for a journalist investigating housing court, a researcher studying an underfunded scientific question, citizens supporting a local public audit, a foundation funding a community investigation, or a government creating an independently conducted public-interest mission. Its modular architecture can include mission registries, sponsorship engines, escrow, financial transparency, governance, investigation and research modules, citizen sponsorship, government allocation, auditing, evidence provenance, public dashboards, APIs, and federated implementations. Rather than simply asking people to donate to an organization, Public Venture lets them identify something that matters, put resources behind it, and create a transparent framework for ensuring that the resulting work remains independent.

This specification is released under the AGPL-3.0+ and is free to use with required Section 7 attribution. Attribution-free deployment is available through a Specification Branding License, with fees based on use and deployment scope.