[Noisebridge-discuss] Thiel grant ideas

[Carl]

Well I was thinking more along the lines of proposals that would include
the rest of the community to participate in, rather than pitting people
against each other.  

Say for example someone had an idea to build a robot.  They'd need some
funds to build the robot.  Anyone who wanted to could participate in
building it, and it would be used here.  How about a robot that gives
tours to newcomers?

Perhaps the project could be building infrastructure for the space. 

Or how about an open-source software project useful to the community?

Rather than just buying laboratory equipment that may or may not be
used, sitting on the shelves gathering dust, how about a specific
project that could use equipment that we currently don't have.  Then
even if the project succeeds or not, we'll still have the equipment for
anyone else to use.

Also, not all projects may need $10K.  Perhaps we can fund more than
one, or split it between projects and general equipment.

-Carl


On Mon, 2012-07-09 at 09:20 -0600, Christoph Maier wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 11:55 PM, Carl <carl at icarp.info> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I like the idea of taking this $10K grant and doing something neat with
> > it.
> >
> > How about a contest?  We could ask Noisebridgers' to submit 1-2 page
> > proposals for projects to work on, then ask the community to vote on the
> > best project.
> 
> As much as I love the idea of Peter Thiel's representative trying to
> throw money at noisebridge,
> I would absolutely HATE a spirit of competing for resources getting
> introduced to noisebridge.
> 
> So I would propose to put together a list of need-to-have and
> nice-to-have laboratory equipment
> which is useful for a long time and for many projects that $10k could buy,
> instead of getting lured into the competitiveness-is-a-virtue-in-itself mindset.
> 
> Greetings from Gert's Gulch in Telluride,
> Christoph
> 
> > Some questions to answer in the proposal could include:
> > * Describe your project idea.
> > * How would your project benefit Noisebridge and/or the larger hacker
> > community?
> > * Please describe how you'd use the funds.
> > etc...
> >
> > On a specified day all proposals are to be posted to the discuss list,
> > then Noisebridge members may have a week to vote on their favorite
> > proposal.  We'll want to set up a voting procedure.  It could work
> > similarly to what we did when voting for board membership.
> >
> > We could see a neat collaborative project come out of this!
> >
> > -Carl
> >