Hi Christopher, Christopher St John wrote: > I've been doing some work with software designed to make it easy for > foundations to get on the web, so I'm definitely interested. But... the > whole microformats thing will be much less painful if you become > familiar with "The Process" as soon as possible.[1]
I'm familiar with the process. I read this well in advance of even broaching this discussion with foundations, and I have links to published examples, which I will post to the Wiki if there are no objections. For starters, see: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Grants/ http://www.hewlett.org/Grants/ http://www.zerodivide.org/grants/awarded2004.html http://www.mott.org/about/programs/grantrssfeed.aspx (RSS link; they also have HTML) I've also read most of the Wiki, and I've been lurking on this list for two months. > The first thing you should know is that The Process only works (and > thus microformats can only exist for) things that are already commonly > published on the web. You can't make something up in advance of > broad usage and call it a microformat[2]. This is very strong constraint, > and means that many things that might make good semantic markup > are not eligible to be a microformat. This is frustrating, but brings some > very real benefits. Understood. Like I said, there are foundations that publish grants information. Whether this information is "commonly published" is another matter. What's the right scale before it's worth putting together a microformat? Three of the largest foundations -- Gates, Hewlett, and Mott -- representing $40 billion in endowments publish grants information. If we can convince these three to start using a microformat, other foundations will follow suit. All three and others are part of the conversation. > On 12/20/06, Eugene Eric Kim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> The real opportunity, in my opinion, is >> working with smaller, community and family foundations. With a critical >> mass of grants information published in hGrant, we could build an >> aggregator for searching, tagging, and studying this data. > > Do any of the smaller foundations currently publish any information > on the web, in whatever format? Most family foundations don't even have web sites. The microformat is part of a larger initiative to encourage all foundations to become more transparent. > Good luck! Enabling a grant ecosystem that requires less manual > data entry would be very nifty. Thanks! I'd love to hear more about your software project (perhaps off-list), and I'd love any feedback you and others could provide to help make this a reality. =Eugene -- ========================================================================= Eugene Eric Kim ................................... http://xri.net/=eekim Blue Oxen Associates ........................... http://www.blueoxen.com/ ========================================================================= _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
