The success of Grants
Ron Teitelbaum
Ron at USMedRec.com
Tue Aug 29 12:43:12 UTC 2006
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-
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