Re: Call for projects for grants

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

As far as I know, grants are typically given for projects that are
beneficial to the general public but not immediately profit-makers. You
can target an area where there's money - like accessibility, research in
the internet, open government/citizenship and perhaps education. I'm
short on ideas for many of these fields, but perhaps there are legs to
exploring them?

Some ideas I have are:

Accessibility:

 * Perfect a free software eye tracker program like OpenGazer (needs a
*lot* of work to be usable & stable)
 * Gestual commands - this existed when I was a young lad, you drew "N"
with your mouse on the screen & this opened netscape. Would be very
useful in touch-screen environments.
 * Open voices - doing quality synthetic voices is a lot of work, major
research project & lots of time in a sound studio with specialised
actors. Funding one (or several) in various languages would be useful.

Internet + accessibility:

 * Integrate an eBook library like Gutenberg Library or Bookshare into
the desktop - integrate well with Orca to make a book reader

Open citizenship:

 * Work with groups like OSGeo, OpenPlans.org, OpenStreetMap, to provide
native high-quality maps, map editors, and (why not?) traffic flow
simulators for the free desktop

Education:

Not sure what we could target as a project here... probably something
concrete like a development project in partnership with a deployment,
perhaps with an existing big GNOME user like Extremadura?

Seeds for ideas, in any case.

Cheers,
Dave.



Stormy Peters wrote:
> Hi GNOME Foundation members,
> 
> I need your help defining GNOME projects you'd like to see happen if we
> had grant money to fund them.
> 
> Brian Cameron has been encouraging us to apply for grant money for a
> while and I think he's right - there are organizations out there willing
> to sponsor good work in the nonprofit space - projects that are for the
> good of the public.
> 
> Applying for grants is not easy. They require identifying appropriate
> grants, writing a proposal, and then going back and forth with the grant
> organization. The application process can take 6 weeks to 6 months, and
> while it's impossible to predict success rate, it does seem like the
> best average rate of any project I've talked to is about 1 in 3, so for
> every 3 proposals we submit, we might get one. (And that's a really,
> really good success rate.)
> 
> In order to successfully apply, we need project ideas. For a successful
> application we would need:
> 
> - A project idea. Why this project? Why is this really important?
> - Urgency. Why now? Why is this idea important now? (The more urgently
> needed, the better according to advice I've gotten.)
> - Benefits. Who will benefit from this work? Most grant organizations
> are nonprofits dedicated to improving the world for the public.
> - Financial plan. We need to show how we'd spend the money from the
> grant. How much money would it take to do this project? How would we
> spend the money?
> - Resources needed. Why these people? Why did you pick these people to
> work on this project? How are they qualified? Why are they the best to
> work on it.
> 
> So if you have project ideas, I'd love to hear them. Also, if you know
> of organizations in your community that offer grants, I'd be happy to
> help you approach them with a proposal. However, the first thing is
> identifying the projects and then identifying the potential grant givers.
> 
> I'm looking forward to seeing your project proposals! I've started a
> wiki page for ideas, http://live.gnome.org/Grants.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Stormy
> 
> 
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-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org