Grants and Programs for Participation in Drupal/Open Source

chachasikes's picture

A few nights ago, I listened to the mp3 from this Drupalchix panel at the DrupalCamp LA. (And many congrats to the organizers Rain Breaw and Nicole Bluto for their smart leadership!) http://2009.drupalcampla.com/drupalchix (see also, http://groups.drupal.org/node/23188)

One of the speaker/facilitators (Rain, I believe) talks about the film industry and how grants are available to support and encourage aspiring women directors. I definitely know a number of women who were able to develop their own visions and voices with the support of various arts grants.

Naturally, this made me wonder: are there similar opportunities that might be available to encourage participation in Drupal/Open Source?

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my initial research results

chachasikes's picture
chachasikes - Sat, 2009-10-31 19:31

The Knight Foundation awarded grants to (larger) open source projects.

Google Summer of Code supports students in projects that can also benefit open source (including Drupal) (You need to be a student to do GSoC.)

(g.d.o. grants tag)

Personally, I am looking for something like the 'Continuing-Ed' version of Google Summer of Code. Ideally, more like a scholarship for a summer project. Or even, a way to apply for a micro-loan to create some sort of tool/web application in collaboration with a local community. In other words, grants between $500-5K that could support small drupal projects, with an expectation of completion, while still allowing failure some exploration of ideas & learning.

The internet does have 80-million listings for programs that support women in computer science.
In theory, these could be creatively re-interpreted for drupal participation.
Does anyone have any suggestions of how to make sense of this overwhelming array of support?

Examples:
http://www.umbc.edu/cwit/financial_aid.html (a sample listing of financial aid for potential students, totally overwhelming)
http://www.womenwhotech.com/resources.html (women who tech's resource list, could lead to finding something)
http://www.linuxchix.org/other-groups-women-free-software.html (other people we could ask. i'll try to forward this post to some of these groups in the next week or so.)

This one looks promising: http://anitaborg.org/initiatives/systers/pass-it-on-grants-program/