A nonprofit transparency crawler operated by the Ecological Servants Project (EcoServants®)

Purpose and mission

EcoServantsBot/1.0 is an open-data transparency crawler designed to index lawful, publicly available grant information from .gov, .edu, and .org sources only. Its purpose is to support the EcoServants® Open Grant Network (OGN), a system that empowers nonprofits to discover funding opportunities ethically and responsibly.

Lawful and ethical operation

• Respects robots.txt, crawl-delay, and all nofollow/noindex directives
• Accesses only public, non-authenticated pages, never behind logins, paywalls, or CAPTCHAs
• Fetch rate defaults to 1 request per second and 1000 requests per day per domain
• Performs conditional GET requests using ETags and Last-Modified headers to minimize server load
• Maintains full audit logs of crawl activity for accountability and rapid takedown response

Data transparency and sources

EcoServantsBot collects structured metadata such as grant titles, deadlines, funder names, and eligibility text. The system integrates verified public data from IRS 990 BMF filings, Grants.gov, and foundation websites listed in the allow-list policy.

All records include provenance fields (source_url, retrieved_at, robots_allowed, and content_hash) to ensure every dataset can be traced back to its lawful origin.

Community compute participation

EcoServantsBot supports an optional Community Compute Client allowing volunteers to contribute limited, lawful crawl requests from their own devices by checking an opt in box. Participation is fully opt-in, capped for CPU (under 15 percent) and network usage, and may be disabled at any time through the user dashboard.

“By enabling Community Compute, I agree to donate limited network requests to fetch public grant metadata from the EcoServants allow-list. No personal data, cookies, or private pages are accessed. Participation can be disabled at any time.”

Takedown and contact

If your organization wishes to request removal or a rate-limit adjustment for a domain, please contact our compliance team.

Version and maintainer

Version 1.0, October 2025. Maintained by the Open Grant Network Development Team under the EcoServants® Data Ethics Framework.