Hello all,

I received a reply from Ton Roosendaal who runs the Blender Foundation.  He
shared his experiences with grants, and said I could share his thoughts with
you.

I agree with Ton that if we are going to fund projects that a professional
atmosphere, proper administration and management, will help to achieve
better results.  We might consider funding research projects administered by
a University, or managed by a company.

Ron Teitelbaum

From: Ton Roosendaal

Hi,

 From Blender Foundation experience:

We've participated twice in the Google Summer of Code, grants for  
students to work for two months on a coding project. Results of this is  
very mixed; it mostly depends on the professional attitude of a  
student. A downside of this approach is that it divides  
volunteers/hobbiests a bit... students get paid for what others do for  
free. That's why it is perceived like a lottery; some people just got  
the luck to be granted.

We've also hired a couple of times active volunteers to do servicing  
(website, development support). In almost all cases, the contributions  
they did while getting paid was less (quantitive as well as in quality)  
than what they did for free.

In 2004, a student of the Amsterdam University graduated on a research  
on this topic, the results of a survey she did in the Blender community  
is summarized here:
http://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2004/Martine_Aalbers/ 
results-summary.pdf
I've asked her to also look at how financial rewards would work in our  
projects. Her conclusion was that this has the danger of diminishing  
motivation. In scientific research on other communities, this is called  
"crowding out".
Her entire paper is unfortunately only available in Dutch:
http://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2004/Martine_Aalbers/ 
MartineAalbers.pdf

As an alternative, I then decided to experiment with another approach.  
This became the "Orange Open Movie" project, which has resulted in the  
3D animation short "Elephants Dream". The target was to establish a  
temporal but highly professional studio in Amsterdam, and invite key  
members of the community to come over to work for half a year on  
realizing a movie short.
That project worked out great in all aspects. It helped Blender  
development, it helped our 'brand', it increased commitment from the  
active volunteers as well as from professionals.

This leads to a separation of two groups of contributors to Blender;
- volunteers: people who contribute to Blender without getting paid.
- professionals: people who contribute to Blender as part of their  
daytime job.

It's important to realize that 'volunteers' still can be highly  
professional in their contributions. For example a 3D developer working  
for company XXX can contribute to Blender in his spare time still. This  
seperation is not about quality of work, but about differencing ways  
for how to support contributors.

My current conclusion is that - when money gets involved - it's  
important to participate in an existing professional environment, or to  
create one yourself (like we did for studio Orange), or to help people  
to setup a business to become 'professional'.
We didn't give out large grants yet, but if we will do I would look at  
sponsoring companies/organizations to hire Blender developers/artists  
for projects.

For volunteers, what works quite well is more incidental support:
- sponsored hardware (we got boards from ATI and Nvidia for example)
- small grants for creating documentation (or helping creating books)
- organize events, and give volunteers expenses coverage, free access,  
drinks/dinners
- art/movie festivals with prizes

-Ton-