OpenITP’s first round of 2013 project funding is still open for proposals! The deadline for application is 31 March 2013

Contact: sandraordonez {_AT_} openitp.org

Reposted from OpenITP.org (see also the OpenITP FAQ for answers to common questions about applying for an OpenITP project grant):

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 translation, 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 that your proposed project is finite (e.g. has a deadline, is scoped) and contributes to OpenITP’s core mission of enabling freedom of communication on the Internet.

We’re interested in all good proposals, but note we’re especially receptive to proposals that improve user experience (UX) and in translation (of both software and documentation). Don’t take that as a filter, though: if you have a good proposal that’s not about UX or translation, we still want to receive it.

While our grants don’t have a hard limit, they 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 try not to burden applicants with a lot of bureaucratic overhead and paperwork to apply for a grant. It’s enough to send us a brief description of what you have in mind, and point 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 publicly-archived forums anyway, and perhaps written up on a public web page — though there may be exceptions, such as projects that are becoming open source but aren’t all the way there yet. In any case, we’re comfortable clicking on links and reading stuff on the Web. You’re not required to package everything up in one PDF to make a proposal. Just tell us what you want to do, make it easy for 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 approved funding for in our previous round:

• An implemention of Off-the-Record (OTR) in Javascript, initially for the Cryptocat project but reusable by other projects.
• Improvements to the GPG Tools project for developers (e.g., build process improvements, etc) and for users (better address book support, documentation improvements).
• Improvements to Serval to ease user adoption (lessening reliance on root access to handheld devices, better peer-to-peer distribution of updates, more end-user documentation).
• Those examples aren’t meant to narrow the possibilities. 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!

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