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• As a fellow committee member (Score:1)

  by btilly (5037)

  I agree with you on the difficulty of finding grants that we're willing to fund. We see too few grants. Once you filter out ones that are poorly defined, were we're not inclined to believe the grantee can do, which duplicate existing work, are not travel or are poor value, well, you pretty much wind up with the list of what we fund. And it isn't very many.
  
  However if TPF looks to be getting too much money and this will be an ongoing problem, it is always easy to find ways to spend money. For instance we
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by autarch (914)

    The grants committee has done a good job of picking grant recipients with the submissions it receives. As you imply, there's a lot of not-so-good submissions which don't get funded.
    
    I think that there could be more submissions if the nature of the grants were different. Specifically, I'd like to see grants aimed at funding a sabbatical from work for the recipients. Right now, the grants are more like little bonuses for doing a lot of work, as opposed to enough pay to live on while doing a lot of work.
    
    Of cour
    • Re:As a fellow committee member (Score:1)

      by Alias (5735) on 2008.02.22 2:45 (#61232) Homepage Journal

      I'd happily apply for something like that...
      
      I'm currently trying to arrange a sabbatical to do the entire June to August conference season, with city visits/talks in between, and hacking on various useful and interesting stuff as I go.
      
      It means a pricey around the world ticket, no income for 3 months, and relying on being "hosted" in the various cities in order to try and keep expenses down.
      
      If any of those fall through and I start incurring hotel bills, or extra flights, or what have you, it gets ugly fast.
      
      And it's a massive undertaking I'm pretty sure I will only be able to pull off once.
      
      If something was in place to help support that sort of trip, it would be awesome.
      
      But currently it is outside the scope of the grant system, which is highly code-based and goal oriented.
      
      I know TPF gave a bunch of money to Damian a few years ago, and I'm not sure how good value money they considered they got in the end...
      
      Since the grants are generally relatively small, doing a grant of that sort again (the $50k annual thing) seems hard to justify.
      
      But if there was an option on something in the 5-10 range that I could apply for to just hack on useful (to other Perl coders) thing, travel the conferences and mongers, and generally do Perl stuff for 3 months, I'd apply in an instant.

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      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Alias (5735)

        But of course, then we get down to favouritism again... since it would be my third grant...