Steppe is a fiscally sponsored civic project building community-governed digital infrastructure for Central Oregon. The first test is capped at 50 people. It advances to a 250-member launch, free for six months, only if 25 or more people participate and local-organization collaboration produces current, real-time local information.
The places neighbors gather online are owned by companies that monetize attention and can be acquired, shut down, or quietly degraded whenever it suits the owner. Steppe is built so none of that can happen here.
Local connection now runs through extractive, ad-driven platforms with no accountability to the people who use them. They sell attention, harvest data, and can be sold out from under a community overnight.
A fiscally sponsored beta building toward a member-governed public benefit nonprofit, with no equity to sell and its core promises carried into the founding documents for member ratification.
Durable local civic infrastructure that belongs to the community itself. Always ad-free, privacy-respecting, and impossible to acquire or enshittify. All towns can adopt the same model and govern it themselves.
Ignite administers sponsor-routed grants, donations, and other sponsored responsibilities. Gregory Chism will administer member subscriptions directly; the planned model keeps subscriptions as the long-term operating anchor.
Ignite is helping with the director search; additional introductions and independent governance expertise remain welcome.
Project funding for rural connectivity and digital-equity programs across Central Oregon.
Broadband-equity, education, and economic-development organizations building local digital capacity.
Towns that want civic infrastructure of their own and intend to govern it themselves.