How the Hub works
The RFP Hub is an open index of funding opportunities. It republishes what programmes and their communities state, under one open standard, and links every reader out to the programme’s own application page. It takes no applications, holds no money, and makes no decision about who gets funded.
The five roles
- Visitor
- Reads everything published, with no account. Applies on the programme’s own site. This is most people and the whole point of the site.
- Submitter
- Any account, created by signing in once. Submits opportunities and edits its own. Every submission waits for a decision before the public can see it — including submissions about a programme you run, until your organisation is verified. Up to five can be waiting at a time.
- Organisation member
- An account a reviewer has attached to an organisation. Sees everything filed in that organisation’s name, published or not. If the organisation is verified, its members publish into its namespace instantly and decide — approve or reject — what anybody else files there.
- Hub reviewer
- A staff role, and deliberately organisation-agnostic: a reviewer works every queue, in every namespace, including the namespaces of organisations they belong to and the ones they compete with. Approves and rejects anywhere, and is the only role that verifies organisations, grants memberships, and settles claims and duplicates.
- Admin
- Everything a reviewer can do, plus the accounts themselves: who holds which role, who may create API keys, and the maintenance jobs.
Who can do what
A dot is an unqualified yes. A phrase is a real limit, and the limits are the interesting part. Every row describes what the API enforces — this page is a description of that, never a second permission system.
| Action | Visitor | Submitter | Verified org member | Hub reviewer | Admin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read the directory and open any listing No account, no sign-in, no tracking of who read what. | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Apply to a programme Always on the programme's own site. The Hub never takes applications. | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Download the data Bulk JSON and CSV exports, and the Atom and RSS feeds. | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Submit an opportunity Any account. It is stored immediately and waits for a decision. | no | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Have more than five submissions waiting at once An account with no verified membership holds up to five undecided submissions. A slot frees the moment one is decided — by a Hub reviewer, or by the organisation it names. | no | no | yes | yes | yes |
| Edit a listing Its own submitter, anyone in the organisation whose namespace it is in, or Hub staff. | no | own | own namespace | yes | yes |
| See listings that are not published yet Your own submissions; and, for a member, everything filed in the organisation's name. | no | own | own namespace | yes | yes |
| Publish without review A listing whose id is in a verified organisation's namespace goes live on submission. | no | no | own namespace | yes | yes |
| Approve a pending submission A member approving one in their own namespace is the organisation endorsing it, in its own name. | no | no | own namespace | yes | yes |
| Reject a submission Always with a written reason, and always under the name of whoever decided. | no | no | own namespace | yes | yes |
| Claim a listing for an organisation Asks for an existing listing to be moved into your organisation's ownership. | no | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Decide a claim | no | no | no | yes | yes |
| Decide a suspected duplicate | no | no | no | yes | yes |
| Verify an organisation The decision that turns an organisation's submissions into instant publications. | no | no | no | yes | yes |
| Grant somebody membership of an organisation | no | no | no | yes | yes |
| Change an account's role | no | no | no | no | yes |
| Run a maintenance job by hand Deadline sweeps, source verification, duplicate detection. | no | no | no | no | yes |
Deciding in your organisation’s name
A verified organisation decides what publishes in its own namespace. Somebody outside the organisation files a listing about your programme; a member approves it — the organisation saying yes, this is ours and it is right — or rejects it. Nobody is better placed to know.
Decisions in your organisation’s name carry your name. A rejection needs a written reason, and both the reason and the handle of the member who wrote it go into the listing’s history, which anybody can read. That is the whole safeguard, and it is deliberately the only one: an organisation that can quietly bury an accurate listing about itself is a problem, and an organisation that has to say why, in public, under a name, is not.
Everything past your own namespace stays with Hub staff. Verifying an organisation, granting somebody membership of one, settling a claim over who owns a listing, deciding which of two near-identical listings survives — those are the four powers that could be used to widen a namespace’s own reach, so they sit with people who have no stake in any of them. Reviewers are Hub staff rather than delegates precisely so that a reviewer decides on programmes they compete with by the same rule as on programmes they have never heard of.
Five waiting at a time
An account with no verified membership can hold five submissions awaiting a decision. A slot frees as soon as one is decided — by a Hub reviewer, or by the organisation the listing names.
It keeps the queue honest. A queue anybody can fill without limit is a queue where the careful submission behind forty careless ones waits weeks for a person to reach it, and the first thing that goes is the review itself. Five is enough to file a whole grants programme in one sitting, and few enough that everything in the queue is something somebody meant.
What “verified” means, and what it does not
Verification says a reviewer has satisfied themselves that the people holding an organisation’s membership really do speak for it. That is all. It is not an endorsement of the programme, a check that its amounts are real, or a statement that it is a good place to apply.
Separately, the Hub runs a low-bar anti-spam check on each listing’s application link: the page exists, and its title is about the same programme. A listing marked link looks right has passed that and nothing more. No amount, no deadline and no eligibility rule on this site has been verified by anyone. Read the programme’s own page before you spend a week on an application.
The words this site uses
- Opportunity
- The thing in the world — a grant round, a hackathon, a bounty, an RFP.
- Listing
- An opportunity as published here. Everything in the directory is a listing.
- Submission
- A listing that has been filed but not yet published. Only its submitter, its organisation and Hub staff can see one.
- Namespace
- The part of an id before the colon —
acme:round-4is inacme. It names the organisation a listing is published under.
The data is yours
Everything published here is available in bulk and by feed, under the same open standard the site itself is built on. There is no scraping-required tier and no export that costs anything.