Introduction

Over the past months, the Community Review and Ideation Selection Process (CRISP) and pre-CRISP teams have been hard at work developing a clear, fair way to filter ideas submitted through the ideation challenge site (and, in the future, through the new portal).

Our goal throughout this cycle has been to strengthen the earliest part of the evaluation pipeline. We wanted to create a process that reviews community-submitted ideas with clarity, consistency, and fairness. By refining our criteria and setting shared guidelines, CRISP helps ensure that ideas reflect the mission of Deep Funding and the goals of each challenge while supporting decentralized, community-led decision-making.

This collaborative effort reinforces Deep Funding’s core values: openness, shared ownership, and meaningful impact. Most importantly, it creates a reliable path for promising ideas to become full Requests for Proposals (RFPs) based on their relevance, quality, and potential.

Now that this cycle is complete, we are excited to share that we have a shortlist of ideas that will be put to a live community vote on Thursday, 4 December!

What Are Ideation Challenges?

Ideation challenges are a new and accessible way for people across the world to contribute ideas to DEEP. Anyone can submit an idea, and—if it passes the filtering and voting stages—it has the potential to become an RFP.

This means two things:

1. Anyone with a strong idea can help shape future work in the ecosystem.

2. Deep Funding can support worthwhile projects between funding rounds.

The challenges are intentionally simple. Participants submit a short idea describing a meaningful problem and an AI-driven solution. If the community approves the idea, it may form the basis for a future RFP.

In this first CRISP-filtered round, the ideas selected through the final community vote will receive USD 1,000. If those ideas later become RFPs, they receive an additional USD 1,000.

So far, we have run three challenges:

• The Open Challenge;

• The AI for Peace challenge

• The BGI Nexus challenge.

The DEEP Open Challenge remains active; the others have concluded.

What Does CRISP Do?

Over the last six months, CRISP has had four main responsibilities:

• Designing the process and setting criteria for both Pre-CRISP and CRISP reviews;
• Conducting a second, more detailed evaluation of ideas screened by Pre-CRISP;
• Documenting the process and outcomes;
• Establishing a rotation system to ensure CRISP remains open and not concentrated in the same hands.

What Did We Actually Do?

This first round of review was a learning experiment involving 140 submitted ideas. We expected two filtering stages:

Our guiding assumptions

For the process to succeed, we assumed:

• The best ideas should naturally rise to the top.

• The system must scale beyond 140 ideas.

• Pre-CRISP and CRISP evaluations should broadly align.

These assumptions will guide future iterations of the process.

1. Pre-CRISP: a broad first pass

A small set of simple yes/no criteria was used to identify ideas that aligned with the challenge and deserved deeper review. These included:

• Clear problem statement
• Feasibility
• Alignment with Deep Funding’s vision
• Innovation
• Impact and relevance

Pre-CRISP also gave each idea a simple “star or no star,” based mainly on intuition.

2. CRISP: a deeper evaluation

CRISP used a more detailed set of criteria, adding:

• Budget considerations
• Safety and ethics
• Revenue potential

This stage aimed for a more rigorous assessment.

Comparing both reviews

To learn as much as possible from this experiment, both teams reviewed all 140 ideas. This allowed us to compare alignment between Pre-CRISP and CRISP and understand where the process worked well or required improvement.

Golden Tickets

We also introduced a Golden Ticket system – much like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Anyone on either team could “fast-track” an idea directly to the community vote. This helped ensure that strong ideas that just missed the threshold weren’t lost due to strict scoring. (Pre-CRISP golden tickets had to pass a minimum threshold of 2/5 CRISP member support.)

What’s Next for Ideation?

Three major developments are coming:

1. A New Ideation Portal

A dedicated portal will streamline backend processes. It will help check for duplicate submissions and compare incoming ideas with existing proposals.

2. CRISP Membership Rotation

To keep the process open and healthy, CRISP members will serve for 3–6 months before rotating out. Two members have already stepped back and been replaced by Gilvania Vileda and Richard Yeboah.

Tommy, Riad, and Esther will rotate out next, leaving Gilvania and Richard to continue alongside newly onboarded members.

3. A New Experiment

The BGI Nexus ideation challenge ideas will be run through a new filtering process, with more refined scoring systems, and subcategorization created to support the right expertise being assigned within the pre-CRISP.

4. A New Supporting Body

A new group will help identify suitable candidates for CRISP and potentially Pre-CRISP in the future.

Conclusion

The first CRISP cycle has been a valuable learning experience in how community-driven ideation can become a strong pipeline for future RFPs. From the start, our aim was to build a fair, transparent, and decentralized approach that surfaces ideas with real potential while remaining aligned with challenge goals and Deep Funding’s mission.

Reviewing 140 ideas showed us where the process works and where we can refine it. For example, the limitations of simple yes/no scoring became clear, and the Golden Ticket proved useful in preventing good ideas from slipping through the cracks. These insights will directly shape the next iteration of the filtering process, beginning with the upcoming BGI Nexus challenge.

Above all, this cycle highlights the essential role of the community. Your participation—whether by submitting ideas, reviewing them, or voting—drives the entire system. As we continue improving the process and introducing more nuanced evaluation tools, we invite everyone to take part in future ideation challenges.

Decentralized ideation only works because the community engages with it, and we’re excited to keep building this journey together.

Next steps

Join us for the live community vote on Thursday, 4th December!