My apologies for not writing much lately. I’ve just moved from the USA to Nottingham, UK. The whirlwind of settling into a new job, trying to find an apartment (ahem, “flat”), and learning how to type on a British keyboard has been quite a distraction for the last few weeks. Now, on with the show!

Have you wanted to contribute to the open-source community but you need a bit of incentive? If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it’s worthy of a grant, please send your grant application to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org. Grant applications must be in by the last day of July and we will be awarding the grants at the beginning of September.

First, please read about how to submit a grant. Read that carefully as grants are often rejected if they don’t meet the criteria. For example, if you want to submit improvements to a well-known project but there’s no evidence that you have at least tried to work with the maintainers of that project, the grant will likely not be approved. You can also read through our rules of operation for a better idea of thee grant process.

To get an idea of what sorts of grants are generally accepted, you can read through past grants for 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. You can also read through the grant-related postings to the Perl Foundation blog. As a general rule, a properly formatted grant proposal is more likely to be approved if it meets the following criteria:

• It has widespread benefit to the Perl community or a large segment of it.
• We have reason to believe that you can accomplish your goals.
• We can afford it (we rarely approve anything more than a couple of thousand dollars).

The thorniest issue, as always, is the grant amount. If you do not include a grant amount, the grant will not be approved. So how much do you ask for? While we have information in this posting about the grant committee, the reality is fairly simple. We’re a non-profit organization and we are not flush with cash. If you charge us a typical hourly rate, we probably cannot afford it. Typical grant awards are generally in the $500 to $3000 range, but we have gone under and over those amounts, depending on the grant. As a general rule the less expensive it is, the more likely it is that we can afford to fund it. For highly speculative grants (in other words, projects whose benefits may be unclear or have a high chance of failure), we are unlikely to risk large amounts of our donor’s money.