Find your door
Maintainers apply for support. Learners join a cohort. Builders apply for the fellowship. Everyone else can simply walk into the Commons.
Technology shouldwiden the world,not narrow it.
Expanse is the community arm of Pensieve Labs. We fund the software the world runs on, teach the skills the next decade demands, and keep both open to everyone. No gate, no invoice, no catch.
THE INITIATIVE
Every generation inherits a frontier. Ours is made of code and models, and it is being enclosed faster than it is being shared.
Pensieve Labs builds with open source and open research. Expanse is how we pay that back: a standing commitment of engineering time, funding, and teaching to the commons we depend on.
It is not a grant programme with a press release attached. It is maintenance, mentorship, and curriculum: the unglamorous work that decides who gets to build the next thing.
Sustain
Keep critical open source maintained, funded, and staffed by people who are paid for it.
Teach
Put practical AI capability in the hands of people the industry has priced out.
Open
Publish everything we learn, curricula, tooling, and post-mortems included.
PROGRAMMES
Four doors. All of them open.
Direct funding and engineering hours for the maintainers holding up infrastructure nobody budgets for.
We adopt under-resourced projects our own stack depends on and give them what they actually need: paid maintainer time, security review, release engineering, and documentation. No equity, no exclusivity, no logo requirement. Maintainers keep full governance; we take the pager rotation when they need a month off.
- GRANT RANGE
- $5K TO $80K
- ENGINEERING
- UP TO 20 HRS/WK
- REVIEW CYCLE
- MONTHLY
- PROJECTS BACKED
- 37
A free, cohort-based curriculum that takes people from prompt to production system.
Twelve weeks, live instruction, real repositories. Learners build and ship an evaluated AI system end to end: retrieval, tool use, evaluation harnesses, cost and safety review. Taught by working engineers, capped at forty per cohort so mentorship stays real. Tuition is zero, permanently, and every lesson is published open-access the week after it runs.
- DURATION
- 12 WEEKS
- COHORT SIZE
- 40
- TUITION
- $0
- GRADUATES
- 1,240
Six funded months for people building public-interest technology that has no business model.
A stipend, compute credits, legal and security support, and a weekly room of peers and senior engineers. Built for civic tooling, research infrastructure, accessibility work, and everything else that matters more than it monetises. Fellows own their work outright; we ask only that it ships under an open licence.
- STIPEND
- $4,000 / MO
- TERM
- 6 MONTHS
- COMPUTE
- INCLUDED
- FELLOWS / YR
- 18
The open layer: office hours, workshops, and shared tooling that anyone can walk into.
Weekly open office hours with Pensieve engineers, regional workshop kits any organiser can run, and a shared toolchain for evaluation and dataset work released under permissive licences. No application, no cohort, no cost. Show up, use it, take it apart, teach it onward.
- OFFICE HOURS
- WEEKLY
- WORKSHOP KITS
- 9 LANGUAGES
- MEMBERS
- 8,600+
- COST
- FREE
II · MOON
What came back
Published quarterly.Audited annually.Boring on purpose.
Figures current as of Q2 2026. Full methodology and raw data are in the public ledger repository.
THE LEDGER
37
Open source projects funded
Across build tooling, security, and scientific computing.
1,240
Learners graduated
From twelve-week cohorts, at zero tuition.
42
Countries reached
Every programme runs remote-first and time-zone fair.
100%
Curriculum open-sourced
Every lesson, exercise, and rubric published.
Figures current as of Q2 2026. Full methodology and raw data are in the public ledger repository.
HOW TO START
There is no waiting list for most of this.
Tell us what you need
One short form, no pitch deck, no letters of reference. We read every submission ourselves and reply within ten working days.
Start the work
Funding lands in two weeks. Cohorts start quarterly. Commons access is immediate; there is nothing to approve.
Pass it on
Publish what you make, mentor the cohort behind you, or nominate the next project. That is the whole obligation.
THE ECOSYSTEM
Backed by people who ship.
Expanse is funded by Pensieve Labs and sustained by partners who contribute engineering time, compute, and curriculum review.
- Pensieve Labs
- Openframe
- Northwind
- Atlas Foundry
- Civic Stack
- Meridian
- Kernel Trust
- Longroom
- Signalworks
- The Commons Fund
III · MARS
Come outward
Bring ussomething worthexpanding.
Whether you maintain a library three million builds depend on, or you have never written a line and want to start, there is a door here with your name on it.