<incom> Mellon Foundation invites nominations for open source awards

[Pieter Boeder]

Mellon Foundation invites nominations for open source
awards
Sunday May 21, 2006 (08:00 AM GMT)
By: Nathan Willis

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is seeking nominations
for a new set of awards to recognize individuals and
organizations contributing to open source software.
The Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC),
as they are called, will endow the recipients with
grant money to further their work. Nominations will be
taken at the Foundations Web site through August 4.
The site also provides a full list of criteria for
nominations, including the specific fields of eligible
work. Winners will be announced in December.

The Mellon Foundation makes grants in a number of
areas benefiting educations, arts, and culture. The
Foundation's Research in Information Technology
Program directly funds a dozen open source projects
and contributes to several more.

The MATC will be awarded at two levels -- $25,000 and
$100,000 -- to recipients selected by an award
committee. The number of awards and the number to be
given at each level will be determined at the
discretion of the committee once the nominations are
complete.

The Foundation specifies that nominees be "making
substantial contributions of their own resources
toward the development of open source software and the
fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open
source development." Eligibility requirements also
state that recipients must make their work available
under an approved open source license.

The awards are intended to function as grants
supporting additional work; as such the award
committee is only interested in individuals and
organizations operating without external resource
grants. Recipients are expected to make follow-up
reports to the Foundation, though the specifics of
this arrangement have not yet been made public.

The award committee includes Mitchell Baker of Mozilla
Corp., Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web
Consortium, Vinton Cerf of Google, Ira Fuchs and
Donald Waters of the Mellon Foundation, John Gage of
Sun, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, and John Brown,
formerly of Xerox PARC.

http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/18/1931219&from=rss

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