Background information
It seems we're a good candidate for a grant. Important info, based on what we've found out so far.
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
The very simple grant questionnaire is as follows:
- Is the grantee is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or has/can get a fiscal
sponsor that is a 501(c)(3) (or foreign equivalent.)
Answer: Yes, the Appropedia Foundation is 501(c)(3).
- A brief description of the project.
- How the project is aligned with the Mozilla Foundation's mission
This presumably means The Mozilla Manifesto (v0.9). The mission is described more briefly elsewhere as "promote choice and innovation on the Internet".
"Project" here means both Appropedia, and the specific project.
- A work plan (methods, goals, timeline, participants, plans to share results)
- Expected outcomes (what will be the end result?)
- Measurements of success (how will the grantee measure what did or didn't work?)
- Amount of funding requested, and the amount of the project budget overall (if different)
up to $10,000
- A list of other current or pending funders for this project (if applicable)
- project start and end dates
Nov 1, 2008 to...
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))
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 developing more 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
- Improve structure through:
- implementing Semantic MediaWiki
- distinguish content types through notices, namespaces, and page structure for different page types.
- integrating ported content into editable content.
The first part may require some technical assistance (not a huge job).
The content related parts require time spent by someone who knows the wiki (I'm putting myself forward for this --Chriswaterguy
Small, task-specific versions
I (Chris) propose not doing this yet. This will make more sense when we have content to choose from, and 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.