No ad hoc funding at present. Can these proposals be repurposed for other funding applications?

Background information

Basic info about the Mozilla - from their manifesto:

• "The Mozilla Foundation makes grants and related expenditures in support of the Foundation's mission to promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Internet."

Principles (emphasis added where it's relevant to us; added comments in italics):

1. The Internet is an integral part of modern life–a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.
2. The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
3. The Internet should enrich the lives of individual human beings.
4. Individuals' security on the Internet is fundamental and cannot be treated as optional. (We do some work on promoting security, through blogging & microblogging.)
5. Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet.
6. The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.
7. Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource. (We use it and promote it.)
8. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust. (We use the wiki and open mailing lists for most of our operations and decision-making.)
9. Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial goals and public benefit is critical. (We engage with businesses, at times successfully encouraging sharing of knowledge, through the use of open licenses and our wiki.)
10. Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

From the Mozilla Foundation Pledge "we will...":

• build and enable open-source technologies and communities that support the Manifesto's principles; (We're enablers of open source hardware and processes in sustainability and development, as well as software.)
• promote models for creating economic value for the public benefit; (Note our support of micro-enterprise through appropriate technology)
• promote the Mozilla Manifesto principles in public discourse and within the Internet industry. (Note Appropedia's role as an advocate of openness - through the wiki and our social media.)

Basic info about the grants:

• Grants under $10,000 are approved by a single person, i.e. much more quickly.
• About 30% of their grant money is for non-Mozilla, philanthropic grants. If they haven't used up their 30% for the year, obviously it's better.
• They like to support those who are: working hard to let people on the edges or outside the net get access to information that will fundamentally improve their lives. (Enabling distributed participation.) Sounds like Appropedia!
• They like to support organizations in becoming more effective, e.g. becoming ready to make use of larger funds.

Questionnaire

See Appropedia:Mozilla Foundation grant application/Submission.

Notes

Some ideas for what to seek funding for

Good ideas might be projects that would help us be more sustainable, or small changes that benefit many users.

Some specific suggestions are:

• Improve structure - distinguish content types
• Small version, in Simple English, with just practical content.
• Best of Appropedia,
• Appropedia for Africa (or something of that type. My thought is that this will be easier with better categorization and/or good use of Semantic MediaWiki --Chriswaterguy 23:23, 7 October 2008 (UTC))Reply[reply]

Some more ideas I've been thinking about:

• Adapting one of the idea mentioned above: "Appropedia for the developing world (practical content in Simple English, Spanish and French)." This should be integrated with the OLPC bundle project. This would mean first developing more well-structured, basic content info (how tos, intros, maybe portals).
• Reaching out to and serving the learning community.
• Scraping relevant public domain sites (& bringing in other large-scale ported content) to populate Appropedia
• Better translation aids - though this is not just an Appropedia issue, so I'd look at this separately and aim for joint funding.

Ideas from CurtB:

• Expand (and simplify) Appropedia's implicit invitation to request users to post content-related questions ("articles they want to see")
• Expand (and simplify) Appropedia's implicit invitation to provide feedback on articles
• Expand volunteer coordination to enable signing up for UN Volunteers or possibly groups like Nabuur.
• Some combination of the above

Concrete proposals

Improve structure

See #Description

Small, task-specific versions

"Best of Appropedia", Appropedia for Africa, Spanish Appropedia etc.

I (Chris) propose not doing this yet. This will make more sense when we have content to choose from and translate, and (ideally) a large community and voting tools to help us choose.

Reaching out to and serving the learning community

Concrete suggestions? (Joshua, Lonny?)

Very high value if we can make it work.

Or make this a part of the earlier project - developing learning-related guide pages and demonstration pages to enable outreach to be more effective.

Mass porting project

While extremely valuable, it's worth noting that we already have more substantial content than most sites, so this might be a lower priority than the #Improve structure proposal.

Identify public domain content (an extension of the Public Domain Search work.

Using a bot to copy relevant public domain sites (& bring in other large-scale ported content) to populate Appropedia. Chris might lead this, liaising with tech people to solve the porting and reformatting issues.