Grants and Programs for Participation in Drupal/Open Source

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chachasikes's picture
Posted by chachasikes on October 31, 2009 at 7:27pm

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

Posted by chachasikes on October 31, 2009 at 7:31pm
chachasikes's picture

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/