We’re collecting the possible funding schemes which could offer support for future hackathons.
At the moment I’ve found this one De Domeinnaam Creatifi.eu is Te Koop - in fact this is a hackathon itself (and one of the entities involved in the project organises hackathons) - the call that would be interesting for us will be open in September, but there is a call that supports polishing the projects and ideas running right now there.
Second option - Focus, Innovazioni Sociale - requires contacting the foundation and checking how would that work. It’s Italian and I also see it as a possible source of cooperation on unMonastery in the future
What steps are involved in identifying funding opportunities?
Hey Natalia, great that you are picking up on this. For community emmebrs who wouyld like to help but don’t know where to start what would you advise? What’s the first step in identifying funding opportunities?
Structured Dialogue projects can take the form of meetings, conferences, consultations and events. These events promote the active participation of young people in democratic life in Europe and their interaction with decision-makers. As a concrete result of these events, young people are able to make their voice heard (through the formulation of positions, proposals and recommendations) on how youth policies should be shaped and implemented in Europe.
Obviously this is natural edgeryders territory. We’d just have to structure it so that the output is something that can be fed to the EU machinery, while also making sense as a “hackathon” project.
The grants are small enough for us to manage (<€50,000), and the next deadline seems to be February.
Reasons why it might not work are:
They seem to have a fixed idea of what constitutes a "structured dialogue", and maybe just want people to run their standard event format (?)
some (most? all?) of the funding will be taken up by the official EU Youth Conference
If it doesn’t work for HaHa, it might for some other Edgeryders project?
Hi Dan, just to say the idea to apply for the same call came up in spring, in the context of fundraising for LOTE.
There are some traps we can identify in advance, as some of us had been involved in writing a Youth in Action application (which had failed), and the calls are incredibly similar. My main issue with this is that they ask you to specify in advance where the event participants come from, and they can only come from countries where partners are based (min 2 partners per country). Which doesn’t work for Edgeryders like open events…
Here are some other observations I made to save us the time put into researching piles of funding requirements, and if you can start from there it would be great. Maybe i’m missing something but given that it’s the National Agencies running this it is pretty much the same as Youth in Action.
Oh, that’s very useful to know. Thanks, Noemi. Knowing the dangers is extremely valuable. It’s hilarious that we might disqualify ourselves from EU funding for being too international
Let’s keep it in mind, I guess? But look for other funding sources first, rather than trying to design an event around their bizarre requirements
I have no tips - I just wander around the internet, observe some groups that promote different funding options (mladiinfo, eduactive, on the move, and so on) - and pick up the things that seem relevant. Then, if you see interesting initiatives, check who funded them in the bottom section - you might come across some wonderful source of money, hopefully. More a matter of luck and intense reading in my case.
EU fundings are painful, but I will keep my eye on them as well.
While researching what is out there I realised that I have basically no idea of where to look form funding. And that it would take a huge amount of time to figure it out on my own. Same goes for others.
Could crowdfunding the best directory and interactive guide to funding for the kind of weird projects that pop up in or through Edgeryders be a good project to run through Makerfox?
It’s reassuring to know that even @Nadia gets confused by chasing funding;)
It would be useful to have that list – both for the end product, and because whoever builds it will be improving their own knowledge of funding sources. So, breaking it up via Makerfox sounds great.
Also a good example of how having ER as a community can help us even if we are all working on different projects.
From a tech viewpoint, this task is pretty adequate for a Makerfox moneyless crowdfunding campaign because:
It is completely DIY.
It benefits co-funders through collective benefits (the benefit being this "How to Fund the Edge" document).
It is better executed by some than many (since gathering initial knowledge lets people do it much faster), so it benefits from crowdfunding rather than direct crowdsourcing.
It can be executed by some (allowing to order "alternatives" via Makerfox, which is good to get the deal done).
If you think we can gather sufficient backers from our and neighboring communities, and also find the 2-3 parallel campaigns that are necessary to allow for inter-project collaboration, I’d give this a go
It’s good to use makefox, but we’ll have to stage-manage it a bit.
First, one of us needs to create an edgeryders project, right? Or we could just rename LOTE4?
Then…In the simplest version: everybody volunteering also makes a donation to edgeryders, and the work and donations cancel out. It’s not using any of the valuable features of makerfox, but at least it goes through the platform.
Slightly better is if ER offers something in return, though I’m not sure what that could be. A bed at the CCC?
Or if we try to build a barter chain involving other people/groups…we need to figure out something that the people doing funding research would want/need. Since most things aren’t yet offered on makerfox, we’ll probably need to rely on our knowledge of people to figure out what they might want.
Yes we have 4 beds to offer at 31c3 for the duration of the event.
Something people doing funding research could use is coding time/smart solutions to help cut down the amount of drudgery involved in this kind of research work.
E.g. Edgeryders could figure out how to aggregate information flows from the identified funding body websites, mailing lists, twitter accounts etc into one place. Maybe even make it a game or something, something which incentivises collaboration to keep a high quality resource going and up to date?
So it seems this will become a collaborative community effort to identify the most relevant funding options for Edgeryders-ish projects? I just published a wiki with what the Makerfox team has gathered here so far: “Funding Databases and Opportunities (seed content)”. Hopefully we can help to start this collaboration with this … and profit from what all you others can make out of this
