[liberationtech] Second Round Opens for 2012 OpenITP Project Funding Proposals

[Dragana Kaurin]

OpenITP's second round of 2012 project funding is now open for proposals!

Should your project apply? Here's some help deciding:

OpenITP project grants are meant to support specific technical efforts to improve users' ability to circumvent censorship and surveillance on the Internet. "Technical" doesn't have to mean software or hardware -- for example, we also consider efforts to improve user experience through testing, projects to improve documentation, meetings that get developers together in person to solve specific problems, etc. The main thing we're looking for is: can you describe how the effort you wish to undertake contributes to OpenITP's core mission of enabling freedom of communication on the Internet?

We don't have a hard limit, but grants tend to be in the $5k-$30k USD range: enough to fund a specific piece of work, or to provide seed funding for a new idea, but not enough to be a primary long-term funding source. Therefore we don't want to burden applicants with a lot of bureaucratic overhead and paperwork to apply for one of our grants. It's enough to contact us with a brief description of what you have in mind, and then point us to public URLs for further details. Since we only fund open source work, we expect that most proposals we receive will already have been discussed in a publicly-archived forum, and perhaps written up on a public web page, anyway -- though there may be exceptions, such as projects that are becoming open source but are not there yet. In any case, the point is that we're comfortable clicking on links and reading stuff on the Web. You don't have to package everything up in one PDF to make a proposal. Just tell us what you want to do, make it easy f
 or us to find what we need to find, and we'll take it from there. We'll ask you questions as we have them.

Here are some examples of things OpenITP funded in our previous round:

-Phase 1 of the Briar Project
-Improving the building/packaging system for Tor Obfsproxy
-Dedicated hardware to help speed up development of Telex
-A developer convening to help Guardian Project sort through some stuff face-to-face
-Phase 1 of the Open Wireless Movement

Those examples aren't meant to narrow the possibilities (it happened that we didn't get a lot of applications for UX improvement in our first round, for instance, but have been having more conversations about that since then). They're just meant to give you an idea of the scope of our project grants and types of projects we're looking to support.

Your turn!
http://openitp.org/?q=2012_round_two_proposal_call

-- 
Dragana Kaurin
Program Associate
OpenITP
kaurin at openitp.org
(937) 626 3617