Arduino is planning to make donations totalling $300,000 to help promote open source projects this year and is asking the community to help identify the most suitable beneficiaries.

In June last year Arduino announced that going forward it was going to donate to the open source projects it collaborates with on an annual basis. In a blog post announcing this initiative Zoe Romano said:

Arduino is based on the contribution of many other open source projects. Arduino is grateful to these efforts and wants to support these and other initiatives through yearly donations. Each year, starting in 2013, Arduino donates to open source projects sharing the Arduino approach and philosophy. 

Last year seven open source projects received $2,500 each. This year the plan is to award grants of $2,000 to 10 projects nominated by anyone who has a suggestion to make - and to judge from the supplied submission form submissions are expected from open source organizations themselves.

There are two chances to make submissions. The first deadline is May 30th, with its five awardees being announced at the end of June. The second round will be during September so that the remaining five can be announced at the Maker Faire Rome in October.

By completing a form via the Arduino blog, you can nominate any association, foundation or institution that meets the following criteria:

• it brings innovations in the open electronic and making ecosystem
• it is an open source project
• it facilitates the exchange of knowledge
• it has an impact on open source ecosystem
• it is a non commercial project

Three beneficiaries have already been chosen by the Arduino founders. They all received monies last year when the following citations were made:

• Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the fundamentals of computer programming in a visual context. The project was initiated in 2001 by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry.
  The Arduino IDE is derived from the Processing IDE.

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users.
  The foundation has created the licenses used by Arduino and created the GCC compiler which is used as a compiler for the Arduino code.

• Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.
  Both the Arduino hardware reference designs and documentation are distributed under a Creative Commons license Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.

If you miss the May 30th deadline remember you'll have a second chance in September.

More Information
Arduino Donations 2014: We are Open to Suggestions

Submission form - May 30th deadline

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