grants

The Drupal Association recently announced Drupal Community Cultivation Grants - a new program designed to provide financial support to Drupal event organizers.

While full details are available at the link above, I wanted to make sure this group knew about the program - please spread the word to aspiring event organizers. Raising the initial funds can often be a large hurdle - this program aims to lower the barrier of entry for organizers.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is a public transportation agency in northern California. As with most transit agencies in the US, we are having funding challenges.

We would like to switch from plain old HTML to Drupal. Are there any grants that would fund design, installation and creation of a Drupal website for a local government agency, including moving old content to the new site?

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.