grants

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.

I received the following invite via email today.

This week I had a talk with Mixel Kiemen, who is an assistant at the MOSI research & teaching group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. It seems that he is in a better position to lead an effort for a European Grant application for Drupal development.

He started a group at http://groups.drupal.org/academics
Apparently there was to much overlap with http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-research-and-academia so he joined this group.

General guidelines

Creating a new proposal for the Knight Drupal Initiative is the first step in a larger grant process. Proposals that are supported by the Drupal community will be sent to Knight Foundation for formal review prior to funding. Applications sent to Knight Foundation may require additional information.

The Knight Drupal Initiative is an annual, open, public grant application and review process. Successful applications will be passed from the Drupal community to Knight Foundation for full review and possible funding.

Anyone may apply. Applications for 2008 are now closed. The program will reopen in 2009. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/16348 for details.

You should review the KDI project goals and KDI Application Tips before you submit a proposal.

Community review

After Boston and the introduction of Long term Drupal, the semantic web has been getting a lot of attention. Kristof suggest expert meeting for semantic web in a recent post. I like the idea much, although I would not restricted it to semantic web (but as every one will be interested in it, it will be the focal point any way). I think a list of short goals (Drupal7 or Drupal8) versus long term goals are needed. The long term goals will require more than two years and experiments may get organized more collaborative than has been the case in the past.

Currently I'm taking up contact with the FP7 contact points to see if we can setup expert meetings. If you check the FP7 site, you'll notice it can fit many of the pillars in general but non in particular. Some creativity will be needed according to the contact point. ... To be continued

Knight Drupal Initiative project goals

Drupal and the Knight Foundation agree that open source digital publishing can enable powerful agents of transformation in their communities.

Knight Foundation is working with the Drupal community on the Knight Drupal Initiative with the following goals in mind:

• To enable more people to enter the digital conversation by lowering the technical barriers to entry.
• To provide powerful tools for digital publication, free and open to all.

Last week at Drupalcon in Boston I realised that it's just not possible to apply for a development FP7 (the 7th Framework Program of the European Union) for Drupal. Things are going so fast that any plan would be obsolete before the project could get granted. That's why I think it would be the most interesting to do a proposal for a series of expert meetings throughout Europe that brings together people to discuss their implementation of the semantic web in Drupal, every time followed by a code sprint.

[This is a cross-post from my blog.]

We had a very successful BoF on Wednesday. The goal was to discusss how the Drupal community would manage our relationship with the Knight Foundation.

For those who were not at DrupalCON, here are the basics:

-- The Knight Foundation (KF) provides funding for open-source development, products and innovations that are in line with their core goal: improving communities through the free exchange of news and information.