Dear Developers
I have heard about this funding opportunity at the OpenITP (Thx Sumana). See Email below.
At Kiwix, we think the spreading of content should be as much as possible decentralized... for technical and political reasons.
Our current setup is based on Metalink and HTTP protocols, but the solutions we use (Mirrorbrain/aria2) are ready to deal with P2P using Bittorrent (also decentralized). This just need a little bit work to get it running.
This work is more than ever before essential for Kiwix: we start to have pretty serious amount of data transfers and bandwidth constraints/costs are increasing dangerously.
In addition, the way we spread the content catalog (the list of ZIM files available to download) is still really centralized and we also search a way to allow people to exchange this list in an ad-hoc P2P manner.
We think that all together this could made a really interesting topic for an OpenITP grant proposal. If a C++ developer is motivated by that topic I'm ready to help him getting that grant request done.
Kind regards Emmanuel
-------- Message original -------- Sujet: [Wikitech-l] Grants available for anti-surveillance/anti-censorship design & other tech work Date : Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:39:35 -0500 De : Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org Répondre à : Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Organisation : Wikimedia Foundation Pour : Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org, "A list for the design team." design@lists.wikimedia.org
http://openitp.org/?q=openitp_first_round_of_2013_project_funding_now_open_f...
OpenITP's first round of 2013 project funding is now open for proposals!
Deadline: 31 March 2013
"OpenITP project grants are meant to support specific technical efforts to improve users' ability to circumvent censorship and surveillance on the Internet. "Technical" doesn't have to mean software or hardware -- for example, we also consider efforts to improve user experience through translation, testing, projects to improve documentation, meetings that get developers together in person to solve specific problems, etc. The main thing we're looking for is that your proposed project is finite (e.g. has a deadline, is scoped) and contributes to OpenITP's core mission of enabling freedom of communication on the Internet.
We're interested in all good proposals, but note we're especially receptive to proposals that improve user experience (UX) and in translation (of both software and documentation). Don't take that as a filter, though: if you have a good proposal that's not about UX or translation, we still want to receive it.
While our grants don't have a hard limit, they tend to be in the $5k-$30k USD range: enough to fund a specific piece of work, or to provide seed funding for a new idea, but not enough to be a primary long-term funding source. Therefore we try not to burden applicants with a lot of bureaucratic overhead and paperwork to apply for a grant. It's enough to send us a brief description of what you have in mind, and point to public URLs for further details. Since we only fund open source work, we expect that most proposals we receive will already have been discussed in publicly-archived forums anyway, and perhaps written up on a public web page -- though there may be exceptions, such as projects that are becoming open source but aren't all the way there yet. In any case, we're comfortable clicking on links and reading stuff on the Web. You're not required to package everything up in one PDF to make a proposal. Just tell us what you want to do, make it easy for us to find what we need to find, and we'll take it from there. We'll ask you questions as we have them."
The page also includes examples of things OpenITP funded in their last round. Please take a look! It would be *amazing* if someone could use this opportunity to help people read and contribute to Wikimedia safely.