[okfn-coord] Response from Ford on Weaving History: a negative

Wed Oct 17 12:00:37 UTC 2007

Jo Walsh wrote:
> dear Rufus, Jonny, all,
> 
> On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 01:00:11PM +0100, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>> Just received the Ford letter regarding Weaving History in which they 
>> politely say no:
>>
>> Given that they receive around 40000 requests a year this isn't perhaps 
>> very surprising and we can now move on to the next set of possible 
>> funders (Sloan/Macarthur etc -- btw anyone in the EU/UK we can think 
>> of?). With this stuff I think we've just got to keep trying.
> 
> I am sorry to hear of this and the previous, and as you say we just
> have to keep trying. Every year I hear about eContentPlus. 

Absolutely -- I'm not particularly disheartened here as with this stuff 
you just have to do the percentages ...

> http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/index_en.htm
> This year's CFP has just closed but it would be worth thinking about
> next year. The application process is a *lot* of overhead but smaller
> schemes may be upcoming. 

We've kept an eye on this but the overhead you mention has put us off. 
We've been talking with Soren Aurer (of DBPedia and now on advisory 
council) about possible EU funding stuff.

> As with all these things it helps to be part of a consortium, members
> in several countries, with some academic and business representation. 
> There may be matching funds constraints. There are Vast Sums available
> through these channels but it could burn a lot of grantwriting energy.

Any suggestions please say. I think this is the time to start burning a 
bit of grantwriting energy (there are also significant economies of 
scale ...). BTW there is a wiki page on the board wiki at:

http://eu0.okfn.org/board/wiki/FundRaising

(user: okfn password: plaworr9)

> I notice Saul is involved in this series of workshops about open
> source software for small "creative" business; 
> http://nm-x.com/project/open-business and remember that "plundering
> the public trust" workshop that he blogged about a while back.
> What was it called again? I can't find it on the blog. 

What this the consultation about the public service publisher?

<http://blog.okfn.org/2007/03/26/response-to-ofcoms-public-service-publisher-consultation/>
<http://blog.okfn.org/2007/01/30/zoetropes-and-nickelodeons-a-response-to-ofcoms-public-service-publisher-proposal/>

> Hey, the blog is great! I like Francis' recent rant, i wrote a very

I know its fantastic -- i always learn something new when someone else 
(such as yourself of Francis) blog there!

> similar one the same day. More Open Social Graph wet feet, huh?
> 
> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/11/google-vs-facebook/
> http://frot.org/devlog/2007/10/11/open-social-scene/

Yeah, marketers will just love to have your social graph. Reminds me of 
attention trust and 'owning your own clickstream so you can sell it to 
advertisers' type stuff.

~rufus