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.