Re: [Fsfe-uk] Grants programme

[Alex Hudson]

On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 22:27 +0000, Jason Clifford wrote:
> I'm conscious of the fact that the existing grants programme has only 
> awarded 1/4 of the money UKFSN donated to date and it seems that the main 
> reason for this is that nobody knows about the programme or what can be 
> applied for.

That's partially true, although we've not been pushing it really until
we'd sorted out the current banking situation.

I should go through all of the applications that were made to us, but we
did get a good few.

Bastien's application was the only one we felt we could fund at the
time, the rest failed for a couple of clear reasons:

      * no clear goal. We got a few applications along the lines of, "it
        would be great if you could donate money to my project". It
        would be easy, but missing the point I think, just to select
        projects and donate money to them. We usually responded by
        saying that although we wouldn't just donate money, we would
        happily consider a reformulated request - no-one ever did that
        though;
      * too much money. We got a couple of applications which were
        great, but would have required thousands of pounds (I remember
        specifically one to aid one of the geodata projects) to
        sustain. 

There were odd other requests that failed for different reasons (one
person wanted to buy some non-free software - I think some Adobe app -
for some not very good reason. Basically, they were mostly either poor
applications (and, we weren't really asking for much) or financially
unsustainable. 

We did also privately push some people to make applications (we thought
up some areas we thought were important - like, at the time, CD
recording software - and asked people who had the skills if they were
interested in applying), but nothing really came of that - I didn't
totally feel comfortable attempting to push it privately anyway, though.

Keeping people aware that it exists has been a problem, but to be honest
we have had a very-slow-but-steady stream of enquiries (a couple of
people asked me about it at the last Expo, I know there's at least two
people planning on making applications). 

It would be worth reconsidering the format - I would say Google's Summer
of Code has been more successful in getting people to apply, and while
they're offering more money (both in total, and per person) I do wonder
if they have figured out the right audience (students without real jobs,
interested in a few hundred quid).

Cheers,

Alex.