Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

30 Jul 2014, 11:47 a.m.

Here Are Some Grants You Could Apply For

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2014 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

When I tell people about grants they could get to help them work on open source/open culture stuff, sometimes they are surprised because they didn't know such grants existed. Here are some of them!

Grants with deadlines:

  • Urgent: August 1st is the deadline for the Knight Prototype grant which "helps media makers, technologists and tinkerers take ideas from concept to demo. With grants of $35,000, innovators are given six months to research, test core assumptions and iterate before building out an entire project."
  • Also coming up fast: August 4th is your deadline to apply for the Open Society Fellowship, which gives you about USD$80,000-100,000 to work on a project for a year.
  • September 30th is the deadline for Individual Engagement Grants applications. IEG projects "support Wikimedians to complete projects that benefit the Wikimedia movement. Our focus is on experimentation for online impact. We fund individuals or small teams to organize, build, create, research or facilitate something that enhances the work of Wikimedia's volunteers." The maximum grant request is USD$30,000.
  • If you're a woman working on a tech project that will benefit girls and women in tech, check out The Anita Borg Systers Pass-It-On (PIO) Awards, which range from USD$500-$1000. The next round opens for applications on August 6th.
  • It looks like November 2014 is the deadline to apply for the Drupal Community Cultivation Grants: "to support current and future organizers and leaders of DrupalCamps, Drupal Meetups, Drupal Sprints, Drupal coalitions, and other creative projects that are spreading information within the Drupal community and educating individuals outside the community about Drupal... Grant awards will range from several hundred to several thousand dollars per project".
Grants that you can apply for anytime:

This partially overlaps with the list that OpenHatch maintains on its wiki (and which I or someone else ought to update), and I have not even scratched the surface really. So anyway, yes, if you need some financial help to do better or more work in open stuff, take a look!

Comments

Stephanie
www.codexjourneys.com
30 Jul 2014, 14:17 p.m.

Thanks, Sumana -- this is awesome information!

Mel Chua
http://blog.melchua.com
30 Jul 2014, 15:50 p.m.

So. Helpful. Thanks for aggregating these resources -- not only are the resources themselves useful, they help me think about project funding in a way that's different from the "apply to the NSF!" model, and also help me show other academics "hey look, you too can think about project funding in a different way!"

Sumana Harihareswara
http://harihareswara.net
30 Jul 2014, 18:17 p.m.

I'm told that TPF (The Perl Foundation) also offers grants. They're evaluated every two months, i.e., January, March, May, July, September and November. More information.

Sumana Harihareswara
http://harihareswara.net
04 Aug 2014, 12:06 p.m.

This was in the main post but I'm moving it out into a comment and slightly editing since there is no active CfP right now:

OpenITP has made grants to fund "free and open source software projects that make tools for circumventing digital surveillance and censorship" so it can fund them. They have tended to give USD$5,000-30,000 and especially like to fund projects that improve usability and interoperability.