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OSI Funding for Mir Develpoment?

Background

A discussion on mir-coders about the possibility of applying for funding from the OSI for funding Mir as a GPL project and not as a IMC project started in September 2003, the bid would have to be in by 30th September 2003, the full text of the invite for bids is on the digitalopportunity web site.

Concerns about Soros

Some concerns have been raised about Soros and it would be essential that any bid is done in a totally transparent way:

if we do go for it then we should do it in a totally transparent way -- all correspondance with the OSI should go via open lists (perhaps a new one just for this?), all proposals should be public, any string that are attached should be made public and all the accounts should also be public so that if there is any critisim we can just point people to all the info about what the money was for and how it was spent etc.

Draft bid text

The Request for Proposals identifies 6 sectors of interest, Mir primarily fits into the independent news media sector and in addition is a tool very suitable for NGO support.

The application categories that Mir corresponds with include knowledge management, collaboration and metadata management (ontologies, semantic web).

Mir conforms to the criteria for funded toolsets in the following ways:

• Mir is currently used to manage XX? Indymedia wen sites around the world and therefore directly contributes to "social missions of civil society organizations and initiatives".

• Mir is in the process of development -- although it is at the stage where it can be used to run multiple web sites it is not at the stage where it is easy to install and deploy. Funding would aid the develpoment to get to the stage where it would become easy to set it up.

• Mir is used to manage content, however it should be considered as an exception to the rule because it does "respond(s) to a significant, unmet need" of Independant Media Centres.

• "Project proposals should fall between $50,000 and $200,000." -- what are we going to ask for? I guess we will have to cose stuff and therefore put time estimates against things...?

• "The project proposal should include a support and sustainability strategy beyond the grant period." -- any ideas on some blurb for this?

Standards that the bid should reference

W3C Standards

• HTML 4.01
• XHTML 1.0
• Cascading Style Sheets, level 1
• Cascading Style Sheets, level 2
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Dublin Core Standards

• Recording qualified Dublin Core metadata in HTML meta elements
• Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML
• Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in RDF / XML

Stuff from the list

> It states the following:
> 
> "#  Given the wide variety of content management systems
>     currently available, proposals for these systems will
>     not be considered unless they respond to a significant,
>     unmet need."
> 
> What would that be? Static production of pages?

No I think the way to pitch it would be to say that the
funding would enable Mir to be made a lot more user and
installer friendly and this would allow NGOs etc to have
Indymedia style web sites and that this is the need that
is not met by other CMS systems that are available... 

http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/mir-coders/2003-September/001314.html

i would suggest the same, but we have to point out, that the 
mir-software is mainly used by imcs and that mir "respond(s) to a 
significant, unmet need" of imcs.

this need for instance could be producing static html-pages which could 
easily be deployed on a non-expensiv dns-based load-balancing-system.

http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/mir-coders/2003-September/001318.html

Sure, I think we could also put a bit of spin on it along
the lines of how work on Mir will make it easy for
charities, NGOs, political campaigns etc to have Indymedia
style web sites etc. Perhaps even illustrate it with the
number of slashdot type web sites that are out there -- we
could say that this funding could allow for a mushrooming
of Indymedia style web sites (hype the branding!) in the
same way... blah... blah...

http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/mir-coders/2003-September/001319.html

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-- Added stuff to the page -- ChrisC - 18 Sep 2003
-- Created page -- ChrisC - 17 Sep 2003