Dear Apache Community Development / Sponsor Relations Team, My name is Alex Vdovenko and I represent Inicia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Spain working on education, social inclusion and public-interest initiatives.
We are currently developing a new open-source initiative called INICIA Civic AI Commons. The objective is to develop responsible, transparent and community-governed AI tools that can help civil-society organizations work with public information, social programmes, public-interest data and other open resources. We were particularly interested in the Apache Software Foundation's Responsible AI Initiative and its focus on secure, transparent and publicly governed open-source infrastructure for AI. At this stage, we are not seeking financial support from Apache. We would first like to understand how an organization such as ours could responsibly engage with the Apache ecosystem, contribute to relevant Apache communities, and potentially develop a European civil-society use case around Responsible AI and open-source technologies. We are particularly interested in exploring potential connections with Apache projects related to data processing, search, document processing, distributed systems and AI/ML infrastructure. We would be grateful for a short introductory conversation with the appropriate person or project community. We would also be interested in exploring the possibility of organizing a European Responsible AI / Civic Tech workshop or hackathon involving civil-society organizations, universities and open-source contributors. I would be happy to send a short concept note describing the initiative. Kind regards, Alex Vdovenko Inicia Foundation Spain
