We have received two proposals for this round. Take a look and give them feedback. Your input is important for us to determine how to use the community money.
If you have a grant idea but missed this round, you can still submit a proposal now. We will review them in the Septermber round.
I don't know the Grants Committee ever published the annual budget. I see reasons to do so and not to do, but let's do it. Transparency is a good thing.
Conclusion first. The Grants Committee's budget for 2014 is $16,000.
Here is how it works.
Suppose you submit a grant proposal of $3,000. Your proposal is great, the community feedback is all positive, and your grant is funded. At this point, we have spent the money; it's like putting the $3000 in a special envelope that has your name on it. The money is still in the TPF safe but it is reserved for you.
Suppose our budget was $9,000. If we funded three grants each of which is worth $3000, we would be done for the year. No more grants would be funded even if these grants were still running. We would not have CFP in this scenario.
Grants are cancelled at times. We open the "envelope" and put the money back into the allocatable pool. We are back in business and resume the CFP process.
We have two running grants which are worth $4,800 in total, so we have $11,200 allocatable for the rest of the calendar year 2014.
Note that the committee is not obliged to use all the money. On the other hand, the committee may choose to use all the money early.
When you apply, therefore, don't try to calculate your proposal based on the budget we have. For instance, it would be a mistake if you define your grant as $11,200 / 3 just because there are three remaining rounds. While the budget is one factor, ultimately your grant value should not be influenced by the budget we have.
As announced in the official blog (link), three grants have been cancelled. All of them have been stalled for some time.
It is neither a pleasant nor easy decision for us to cancel grants regardless of a reason. I understand the grant managers and the grantees did their best to make progress but delivering a grant is not always easy.
One of the major reasons to terminate grants is our budget. In the next post, I will discuss our budget and explain why it is necessary to cancel stalled grants.
The Grants Committee approved and funded the grant proposal "Modern Object Oriented Programming in Perl" in the previous round.
This is our first time to fund a grant which exceeds $3,000 since we lifted the grant limit of $3,000 earlier this year.
I am pleased that we are now able to fund larger scale grants and help the Perl development. While we don't have unlimited budget, it is the right thing that appropriate amount of money is funded for good projects which will help the growth of Perl.
If you did not submit a grant proposal in the past just because $3,000 limit was too low, act now. The deadline of the next evaluation round is July 15th.
For choosing the grant amount, see "Improving the grant program (1) Grant Limit" too.
As communicated at the May round closure, we are accepting grant proposals all the time (Submission link). We evaluate them every two months and another evaluation month, July, is coming.
Here is the July schedule:
So you have a bit more than two weeks to be considered in the July round.
If you miss the deadline of July 15th, you can still send us your proposal later in July and it will be evaluated in the September round.
Helping the Perl Foundation. tpf-grants-secretary at perl-foundation.org