Grants & Funding Systems
Financial-Integrity Intelligence
AI & Knowledge Operations
Systems & Infrastructure
Regis Chapman
Grant Operations Lead · Funding-Systems Design
Summary
I make public-goods funding systems work: the quality evaluation that decides which projects reach a community’s capital, capture and extraction designed out, and the round kept legible as it scales. At Octant Labs I ran grant operations across seven funding rounds, evaluating proposals, designing rounds and intake, authoring the precision and data-quality standards beneath grantmaking, and building the tooling that ran it. I evaluated nearly 800 grant applications individually, more than 450 in a single round, stewarded 159 project grants through a full platform migration, and built the dashboards and pipelines the grants team used daily. Before crypto, my career spanned three decades in systems and network architecture (Apple, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, enterprise IT) and co-founded a conflict-resolution DAO called GravityDAO. I read how a system is actually built and make it run, whether that is a grants program, a server network, or a group that cannot agree.
Selected Work
How public-goods funding actually works, where it breaks, and what a funding system has to do on the back end to keep capital going to real work. Written for practitioners who run rounds.
A published workbench for AI-assisted evaluation where there is no clean standard to measure against: the discipline I bring to a candidate pool, made usable by anyone with an AI assistant. Includes three MCP servers that put the standards and the vocabulary discipline directly inside the assistant. Establishes what is there and hands the worth-judgment back to the evaluator.
The grants standards’ public home: a working grant-round configurator, theory-of-change builder, and AI prompt library. The reference implementation a funder can use today.
The evaluation stance beneath the funding work: get the reference right, grind against genuinely independent accounts, keep the verdict human.
A live tool that flags terms carrying unearned weight in a proposal or spec, and offers the plain replacement. Runs in the browser.
Skills
Grant lifecycle management
Grant operations
Proposal evaluation
Due diligence
Data quality & integrity
Evidence quality & evaluation rigor
AI-assisted evaluation (PT4AI)
Precision standards
Monitoring, evaluation & learning
Public goods funding
Quadratic funding
Round & intake design
Process design & improvement
Systems migration & change management
Grantee tracking (KarmaGAP)
KPIs & dashboards
Coordination & documentation standards
Standards authorship
DAO leadership & coordination
Conflict resolution
Stakeholder engagement
Community management
Web3 / Ethereum
Notion, Airtable, Linear, Fillout, Discord
Systems & network architecture
Experience
Octant Labs (formerly Golem Foundation) - Grant Operations Lead (titled Community Grants Specialist)
Nov 2024 to Jul 2026 · Remote
- Ran grant operations across seven consecutive funding rounds, each a cross-functional program, planned and project managed end to end, stewarding 159 project grants through a full platform migration delivered while rounds were live. More than 1,400 ETH went to projects across the rounds I ran.
- Evaluated nearly 800 grant applications individually across the seven rounds, more than 450 in a single round; wrote full researched evaluations of all 76 submissions in an open-application round.
- Served as the quality gate ahead of allocation: evaluated and curated the candidate pool that went forward for funding, keeping capture and undisclosed conflicts out, including detecting and documenting a multi-year undisclosed conflict-of-interest network spanning funding rounds.
- In one round, took a mandated, tool-generated candidate set and built a deeper 12-step evaluation framework that produced the funded list, which management adopted directly.
- Designed rounds and Fillout intake, and built the grants team’s operational backbone: Vercel performance dashboards, evaluation pipelines in Linear, Notion, and Airtable, and KarmaGAP grantee tracking. The workflow grew more thorough and faster round over round.
- Rewrote the applicant-facing materials and intake so any applicant could follow them without a translator, cutting every question the program did not act on; application quality rose because applicants could finally tell what was being asked.
- Authored the public grants standards beneath grantmaking, all CC0: CROSS (obligation and impact reporting), WALKRI (intake data quality), and GRAIN (the descriptive grammar of grant programs), with CRAFT and ORE beneath them as the evidence layer. Aligned by construction with USAID data-quality criteria, OECD DAC evaluation standards, IRIS+, and FAIR data principles.
GravityDAO - Co-Founder & Strategic Lead
2019 to 2025 · Remote
- Co-founded and led a DAO focused on conflict resolution (a Token Engineering Commons working group in 2019, independent from 2021, wound down 2025).
- Built conflict-resolution frameworks adopted by 15+ web3 communities, with a 90% dispute-resolution rate.
- Designed and built the teaching apparatus and ran the organization’s operations, outreach, and facilitation; trained 120+ DAO members across 8 cohorts and ran workshops for 200+ people.
Token Engineering Commons - DAO Coordination
2020 to 2023 · Remote
- Advised DAOs on coordination and organizational development; authored original frameworks, including The Virtuous Cycles and a decolonization framework.
Earlier
- Senior IT System Administrator (titled Information Technology Technician), Cowichan Tribes (Nov 2016 to Nov 2024): infrastructure for 500+ users; server, virtualization (VMware/ESXi), networking, and VoIP.
- Senior Ecommerce Consultant, Grow Mushrooms Canada (Nov 2019 to Jan 2025): freelance, part-time alongside the full-time roles above; system administration, site architecture, and marketing automation for an ecommerce business.
- Non-Windows DevOps Lab Engineer, Microsoft (contract, 2011 to 2014), and System Architect, UniversalMac (2014).
- IT Director, Graphic and Web Designer, and Head Yoga Teacher, Sivananda Ashram Yoga Farm (2005 to 2008); Phone Support Engineer, Apple (2002 to 2005) and Sun Microsystems (1998 to 2000); earlier technical roles 1994 to 1996.
- Founder and Head Instructor, Silent Motion Yoga (Mar 2009 to Aug 2024).
Education & Certifications
Certified Yoga Instructor
Sivananda Ashram Yoga Farm (2005)
Sivananda Ashram Yoga Farm (2005)
Links
CrossWalkri, Grants & Data Quality Standardscrosswalkri.com
CRAFT & ORE, the evidence-layer standardsgithub.com/CrossWalkri
Coordination Structural Integrity Suite, interactive guidegithub.io/ai
GitHubgithub.com/durgadasji
Standards indexgithub.com/durgadasji/standards-index
This page carries my public contact details. For a copy with full contact information, open the Google Doc or get in touch through the site.