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« Last post by mouser on April 17, 2017, 05:46 PM »
The problem with me and these ideas is that they end up in the discussion stage so long that the idea just withers away and dies of neglect, usually after an unnecessarily complex discussion of a million different remote possibilities and complicated options.
Let's try keeping things simple and pulling the trigger on a test run of this idea, as follows:
I'll send out a newsletter in early May, announcing that we give away a grant of $1,000 of funding for the 6 month period of July-December.
Folks will have until June 1 to submit a short (less than 1 page) proposal by email, describing a coding project they plan to work on during that time.
Meanwhile I will collect pledges from anyone who wants to help fund the grant.
Ideally we would raise enough pledges to be able to do this every 6 months.
As for choosing who to award the grant money to and how, I'm sure we will learn how to do a better job, but for now we can simply have a discussion among those who are pledging the money and decide how to split it up.
There is no reason we have to have only a single "winner", and no reason we shouldn't allow teams, etc. But I think having the money go to a single recipient will help make it feel like it's actually meaningful for them.
But we could award non-monetarily-significant official "grant" status for others if that might have some value for them in terms of getting recognition, publicity, credit in school, etc.
I suggest that we simply ask recipients to pledge to write a short monthly project report and an end-of-grant summary, all can be in the form of simple short blog posts.