Announcing the Open Source Software Virtual Incubator - mini-grants up to $10K or larger ($100K+) grants

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Plaintext Group (from Schmidt Futures) is launching the Open Source Software Virtual Incubator. We want to source the most ambitious and innovative ideas to systemically improve the sustainability of the OSS ecosystem. Selected proposals may receive mini-grants up to $10K or larger ($100K+) grants. Apply here: GitHub - PlaintextGroup/oss-virtual-incubator: We are seeking to support the most ambitious and innovative ideas to systemically improve the sustainability of the OSS ecosystem. Submit your idea or view other ideas here.

Rather than a traditional RFP process, where the submissions are private, we hope a public submission process creates a resource for the entire community to give feedback on, improve, and collect proposals together. Ideas can range from (but are not limited to) research proposals to specific technical improvements to institution-building to policy ideas. Apply today! Feel free to reach out with any questions.

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Amazing project. Can we send you a proposal for solving the financial sustainability in FOSS projects? Is there a guideline for presenting the idea?

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Yes – there’s a proposal template that you can fill out and then make a PR. See GitHub - PlaintextGroup/oss-virtual-incubator: We are seeking to support the most ambitious and innovative ideas to systemically improve the sustainability of the OSS ecosystem. Submit your idea or view other ideas here. !

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New proposal: Software ecosystem map

Can we build a map of the software industry that shows the resources allocation on proprietary and open source software?

The goal is to see the size of the market failure and help open source community/policy-makers to develop public policies to improve the resource allocation for open source software in the industry.

As usual, any feedback is more than welcome! :pray:

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Is there a way to apply to the Open Source Software Virtual Incubator without using proprietary software?

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It’s impossible (I think) to completely avoid proprietary software in anything you do on the Internet, but I’ll give it my best shot: you could email a .patch file to contact@plaintextgroup.com!

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Thank you for agreeing to act as my proxy via mail, this is very kind of you :heart:

Avoiding proprietary software when navigating the internet is indeed very challenging :slight_smile: However there are excellent self-hosted Free Software forges that could be used instead of GitHub.

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It is my understanding that for the foreseeable future the mini-grants are suspended as the focus shifts to more ambitious goals such as:

  • explaining to policymakers why Free Software is a good idea in general or,
  • funding organizations that are used to distribute cascading funds from governments such as https://www.opentech.fund/ or https://nlnet.nl/

@epicfaace feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken :slight_smile:

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Yeah at the moment we haven’t been able to get mini-grants through! That’s not to say that the ideas haven’t inspired interesting conversations and discussions with other funders, though. Our priorities for the remainder of 2022 are outlined here: GitHub - PlaintextGroup/oss-virtual-incubator: We are seeking to support the most ambitious and innovative ideas to systemically improve the sustainability of the OSS ecosystem. Submit your idea or view other ideas here.

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