Prototpye Fund - Public Money for public code

[Matthias Kirschner]

Hello everybody, 

IIRC there was no information yet on the list about the Prototype Fund.
Today I saw that parts of their website are also available in English
now. I would like to know what you think about the programme and if you
know of similar programmes from other countries in Europe.


Related to our Public Money Public Code campaign the *Prototype Fund*
https://prototypefund.de/en/ is a programme to support software
developers living in Germany to create a prototype of their ideas. It is
funded by public money of the German government. You can receive 47.500€
for 6 months, and the result of your work has to be under a Free
Software license. Additionally the OKFN provides coaching, consultancy,
and networking for people involved in the projects. So the programme
covers a first phase of prototyping, in which you hopefully can also
develop ideas for sustainable working on your ideas afterwards.

Some of the project descriptions are now also available in English
<https://prototypefund.de/en/projects/> . For example there is one
project to document war crime, the Syrian Archive
<https://syrianarchive.org/en/>: 

  The Syrian Archive aims to support human rights investigators,
  advocates, media reporters, and journalists in their efforts to
  document human rights violations in Syria and worldwide through
  developing new open source tools as well as providing a transparent
  and replicable methodology for collecting, preserving, verifying and
  investigating visual documentation in conflict areas.

I would be interested what you think about the approach of the prototype
fund, if you know about similar approaches elsewhere, and also wonder
which projects on their list you would consider as good examples to
mention when explaining Free Software.

Best Regards,
Matthias

PS: For transparency reasons I want to mention that I was a jury member
    of the prototype fund, except for the last round. 

-- 
Matthias Kirschner - President - Free Software Foundation Europe
Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin, Germany | t +49-30-27595290
Registered at Amtsgericht Hamburg, VR 17030  |   (fsfe.org/join)
Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner)  -  Weblog (k7r.eu/blog.html)