Grass Commons

Wagn grew out of Grass Commons' efforts to build a consumer education website for organizing the rich and varied data we need to make wise, ethical decisions about spending money.

Ethan McCutchen and Lewis Hoffman first conceived of Wagn at RecentChangesCamp, a conference on wiki and community that was first held in Portland, Oregon in February, 2006.  They opened up the source code for Wagn in April and then launched Wagn.org in July.

In August of 2006, Grass Commons was awarded a development grant from Meyer Memorial Trust, Oregon's largest private foundation and an avid supporter of open source projects of social import. Since then MMT has funded three further rounds of major development.

Wagn has evolved and matured thanks to a wonderfully brilliant community of contributors.  John Abbe joined the team in early 2007 and contributed deeply to Wagn's design and ethos.  Gerry Gleason added thousands of hours and many hundreds of code commits.  Brandon CS Sanders, Arthur Brock and Jean Russell each served as wonderfully active board presidents, and countless others have added invaluable wisdom and expertise.

Wagn 1.0 was released in mid-2009.  Wagn 2.0 is scheduled for release in late 2012. 

Wagn was named a finalist for the Tides Foundations' Pizzigati Prize for public interest computing and nominated for the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration.

Grass Commons is a 501c3 public education charity.