Support without surveillance

Mahanu guide · FAQ · Vision · For builders & learners · Safety

Mahanu is funded first by hosted-project fees. Direct sponsorship and the Support & Resources directory are a second, deliberately bounded way for useful businesses, foundations, and individuals to help people pursue real work. They are not advertising infrastructure and do not turn members or their work into inventory.

The Support & Resources directory

A vetted sponsor may create a public support card. It is a structured listing, not a personal profile or a promoted post. It may offer a grant, competition funding, equipment, a discount, a useful service, an open resource, or a workshop. Every card says who is offering it, what it offers, its terms, and any commercial relationship.

Project owners find support deliberately in three ways:

Categories and keywords. They browse or search the public directory themselves.
A public project card. An owner may ask Mahanu to search against the project’s already-public name, tagline, and purpose.
Selected project material. An owner may select specific files or passages and ask for a related match against public support cards. The selected material, resulting vector, and inferred topics are not sent to a sponsor. The owner sees why a result matched, may remove a source, and must repeat the action to search again. There is no continuous background profiling.

A project owner controls whether it is available and what material it may use. It is never based on a member’s activity, searches, assistant use, identity, contacts, location, age, device, browser, or social graph.

An organization may also run an ordinary Mahanu project when it genuinely serves a shared pursuit. It receives no commercial privilege over any other project. A support card is for the different case: a business or fund offering help to projects, not claiming that selling something is itself a member project.

Direct sponsorship and grants

Sponsors can fund a public grant round, competition, or a project that affirmatively applies. The public record names the amount, eligibility, selection process, dates, sponsor relationship, and recipient. A sponsor receives only the application fields and attachments a project owner deliberately submits — never the workspace, membership list, or usage data.

Funding buys no editorial control, membership, access, directory ranking, moderation influence, product influence, or right to contact members. A project owner initiates any contact. A funded project must show a factual sponsorship acknowledgement in Mahanu’s grant/project metadata or public funding record; it does not have to put a brand inside the project’s creative or scientific work.

Projects with supervised members may apply through their guardian. Sponsor names and factual grant acknowledgements may be visible where transparency requires them, but no sponsor receives child data or has a direct channel to a child.

What “no data sales” means

Mahanu does not sell, rent, license, trade, disclose, or give paid access to user or project data — directly or through a partner — in exchange for money or any other value. That includes content, identities, contacts, technical identifiers, activity logs, derived interests, audience segments, vectors, and analytics that reveal how people or projects behaved.

There is no data-access loophole called an ad service. Sponsors cannot buy a list, a look-alike audience, retargeting, a measurement pixel, a campaign dashboard, click-through or conversion reporting, a custom insight report, or access to a project. Mahanu processes the minimum data required for accounts, sync, billing, security, and a feature a team invokes; that is service operation, not a data sale, and the Privacy Notice describes it plainly.

Mahanu may later evaluate a privacy-preserving, directory-level aggregate report for sponsors. It would require high minimum thresholds, delay and noise, no clicks or conversions, no project/user/device/geographic breakdowns, no small cohorts, and no payment tied to results. Until those safeguards are independently reviewed and implemented, sponsors receive no performance report.

Sponsor review and technical boundaries

Mahanu reviews a sponsor and every support card for honesty, usefulness, safety, and fit with the project rule. We reject deceptive material, compulsive design, data-collection-dependent offers, gambling or predatory finance, exclusivity that hides useful alternatives, and any request to conceal a commercial relationship. Sponsors do not review private Mahanu projects.

The directory is delivered by Mahanu. It contains no third-party ad exchange, pixel, script, iframe, remote asset, cookie, SDK, fingerprinting, tracking redirect, or affiliate parameter. A plain external link clearly says that it leaves Mahanu; it carries no Mahanu tracking parameter or redirect. Someone who voluntarily visits an external sponsor site makes a normal web visit to that site, which may learn what their browser or they choose to reveal. Mahanu must not conceal that boundary.

Not part of this model

There are no sponsored placements in workspaces, editors, Timelines, assistants, notifications, billing/privacy/recovery screens, or mobile interstitials. There are no feeds, paid ranking, sponsored search results, sponsor direct messages, unsolicited invitations, or WhatsApp-Business-style commercial privileges.

A sparse, clearly marked featured-support rail outside main content may be reconsidered only after the directory has been tested and only if it preserves these boundaries. It is not part of the current product decision.