This session was in two parts:

1. a fifteen-minute video (a remix of the session I delivered at PyOhio, with five additional minutes of material)
2. a one-hour discussion

The additional material in the MozFest video (slides, rough script) included:

• a shout-out to the OpenHumans grant opportunity
• more hypothetical budgeting details: Seven months of working full-time is probably enough time for a skilled Python developer to port a command-line tool for geology researchers from FORTRAN to Python. Or, if you split that money between a user experience researcher and a technical writer, again at $150 per hour, then they could work together for three and a half months, which is probably enough time to interview a bunch of your users, make a really detailed report on user needs to help your developers prioritize your roadmap, overhaul all of your documentation, and overhaul a lot of your error messages.
• an overview of the kinds of information most funders want in grant proposals:
  • basic contact details, including the person or organization that will receive the money
  • a few paragraphs about the task you want to perform
  • the amount you're asking for, and a short description of what you'll spend it on
  • who uses your software? have some statistics here - download numbers, users on the mailing list, etc. -- but also this is where you talk about specific important or prestigious users and downstreams.
  • what goals will this accomplish? how it will make the world a better place? and why do people need this? why is it important?
  • what is your plan for how you'll do it -- how will you use this money? what's your proposed schedule? try to break things down so no chunk of work takes longer than a month; if your project stretches out over 6 months or more, try to break that up into 3 or more milestones, each of which is a few months' worth of work, to help the reviewer think about what you might get done if the project goes over schedule and you run out of budget
  • does this project currently get any other regular income?

  (Since funders are mostly asking the same questions, you can take a rejected proposal and lightly rewrite it to submit to another funder. Kind of like how I gave a version of this talk in 2020, then added some more material to share at MozFest in 2021.)

The discussion was lively and varied. We talked about several topics and shared resources, and wished there were a thorough aggregator of funding opportunities for open source work, bigger than the one that the PSF's Project Funding Working Group has put together.

Some funding opportunities people brought up:

• The European Union's Horizon program
• The Python Software Foundation's grants
• The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's Essential Open Source for Science program
• NLNet
• OpenHumans
• European Broadcasting Union (recommended by one participant who said: "the last one I applied for was with the EBU and was 10000 euros. This was filled in by me and was one form on their site. Nice and simple, perfect for a single developer")
• Grant For The Web, including a game/immersive developers fund
• "It's also worth saying we have many funding bodies in the UK/EU for example the British Council."

And we discussed the question "how do you get a community going and solicit money when you don't have anything to show yet?" and the fear that people will steal one's ideas, and the problem of answering funders who ask you "how will you sustain this project after the funding ends?"

Some other resources people mentioned:

• "Sustainable Funding Case Studies (still early days on sharing these)"
• "In the future there will be Open Ed Courses on Web Monetization and Sustainable Funding Models here (check back in a couple of months)"
• "Sustainable Funding Interviews (again still early days on sharing)"
• Some examples of web monetized platforms: https://coil.com/, https://cinnamon.video/, https://www.pumabrowser.com/, https://gfam.live/, https://mg.social/
• "Ford Foundation has some grants for open source projects. They recently gave out these"
• Andy Oram who's available as a freelance grantwriter
• NESTA as a source of information for funding opportunities
• I mentioned The Foundation Center, which has now morphed into Candid, a resource to help you find funding from foundations (among other things).
• "The EU funded project is called 2Immerse and the open source code is here ... BBC Together is like Netflix watch party? You could build this with https://github.com/2-IMMERSE/cloud-sync"

Thanks to everyone who watched or participated!