reapply for a Shuttleworth Fellowship

[chadwhitacre]

https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/applications/

Previous attempts: 2012, 2013.

Drafts

• application form
• working draft
• draft 2
• draft 1

Todo

• [x] video
• [x] resume
• [x] dozens?

[chadwhitacre]

Applications for the September 2016 fellowship intake open on 1 December 2015.

[kzisme]

I hope this works out :)

[techtonik]

I'd like to participate to clear the obstacles for cross-border funding of open source projects. Doing this requires researching legal requirements in different countries, but we can make a simple framework that people in these countries can follow to find out how it works for them.

[chadwhitacre]

Applications are open: https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/application-form/.

[chadwhitacre]

Due April 1.

[techtonik]

I can't wait so long.

[chadwhitacre]

@techtonik Yeah, this isn't instant gratification. :)

[techtonik]

I need to find some funding very quick and every grant program requires to fill a lot of papers and wait a year or more. And I need something to eat in two weeks and if I won't find anything close to Gratipay, I will have to reformat my neural network back to comply with corp. ethics and workflow. It is sad.

[chadwhitacre]

Applications for the March 2017 fellowship intake close on 15 October 2016.

https://shuttleworthfoundation.org/

[chadwhitacre]

I really want to get to this.

[chadwhitacre]

Alright! https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/836 is in, this one is next. :shamrock:

[chadwhitacre]

The deadline was extended to November 1 in https://github.com/ShuttleworthFoundation/shuttleworthfoundation.org/commit/88950cb530184bdfe1da69c4d56f7a7c5a5402ad.

[chadwhitacre]

I just watched a couple Cory Doctorow interviews because he is the final boss of Shuttleworth this year and I've never really engaged with his work too much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4y3btcBD-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEEgb1cAwvk

He is a very articulate person. 😶

[techtonik]

My association with all that that simple payment system with taxes is good, but generates no interest tthere, because it is a simple commercial project (despite of openness), but if you read about Aaron Swartz, there could be more to add into that.

[chadwhitacre]

https://changelog.com/podcast/221

[chadwhitacre]

http://www.crimeflare.com/doctorow.html

Wow. Prescient.

[chadwhitacre]

https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/application-pointers/

Most of the advice is "what not to do." The one relevant one (emphasis mine):

• “The Facebook for…” or “Like a social networking site for…”: Facebook and other social networking sites exist. They are theme agnostic and allow you to engage with others around any topic/theme/identity of your choosing. They also already have millions of users. Why does your theme/topic/subset of people need their own site? Why can’t they just use Facebook or similar? What will make this specific group come to your version? How will you let them know about it? Same goes for “crowdfunding platform for…”.

The positive advice:

• Address your application to us and customise it accordingly. Generic proposal material does not tell us why we should specifically support you.
• Let us understand your context. Making it as real as possible allows us to understand your frustrations and see the applicability of your solution.
• Openness is not an add on. It is a fundamental approach to both participation and intellectual property. Other than that, there are no absolute rules, only strong suggestions.

Re: video:

• Picture quality on your video is less important than sound quality. If we are distracted by trying to understand what you say, your message will not come across.
• When compiling your video, assume the viewer has not read your documentation. Set the scene, but ensure that you mention your specific idea as early as possible in the video.
• Focus on what you want to do next. We would like to hear about how far you’ve come, but this is not a history lesson. It is a pitch on how you are going to change history.

[chadwhitacre]

Also:

• We want to support the exploration of a specific solution to a specific problem[.] We are looking for a specific result in change in behaviour.

[chadwhitacre]

Any guidance on how many applications are expected? And how many will be on the shortlist that @/doctorow sees? Would you be able to provide any examples of successful past applications, to illustrate https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/application-pointers/?

https://twitter.com/whit537/status/786213273045651456 https://twitter.com/whit537/status/786220556471250944

[chadwhitacre]

From my current draft:

During our initial run, we had dozens of tech companies on board, including Stripe, Heroku, Digital Ocean, and Khan Academy.

Dozens? Really?

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! Draft 2 ready for review. I was looking at the wrong number on the character count and went over the 1500-character limit on some of the answers, so I'll have to revise those down. I also need a resume, a video, and a fact-check on the number of tech companies we had on Gittipay 1.0.

[chadwhitacre]

Any guidance on how many applications are expected? And how many will be on the shortlist that @/doctorow sees?

We have no quota, we see what we get in any given round and shortlist what we believe in. Average success rate is 1/100.

https://twitter.com/ShuttleworthFdn/status/786464006882156544

Would you be able to provide any examples of successful past applications, to illustrate https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/application-pointers/?

We have the successful candidates on our site https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/ Some of their application videos are still on YouTube. Best advice is to submit what YOU think is right. We want to fund your idea, not your idea of what you think we want to see.

https://twitter.com/ShuttleworthFdn/status/786463033073762304 https://twitter.com/ShuttleworthFdn/status/786463428764368896

[chadwhitacre]

Some of their application videos are still on YouTube.

Here are the videos I found by searching for "shuttleworth $name" on YouTube and poking around, representing 33% (13 / 39) of current and past fellows. Some are reapplications for additional funding.

Fellow	Link
Isha Datar	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9DPaa9rssg
Peter Cunliffe-Jones	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pHecygUPu4
Aaron Makaruk	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qalD--ZkAwg
Johnny West	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEQ4ZF8RiLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6dv5LDVlA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24q_TUeX_fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vagys3gPpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIcDKMzOBX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5nbCI8SBls
Luka Mustafa	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOvdjWUcLJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRgUJiXQ7QQ
Sean Bonner	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a0eiTsDgI8
Seamus Kraft	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV96QUil7Ec
Peter Murray-Rust	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ8qkKNMvWA
Rory Aaronson	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6aSElNmVUU
Daniel Lombraña González	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptBT8O4Oc5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuKAXLJo8gE
Dan Whaley	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=870cigukV5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PIw8hESgGI
Marcin Jakubowski	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr2xJbD49lo
Kabir Bavikatte	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt5IjgOWTm8

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, the video is a lot more work here than over in #836. It's five minutes instead of one, and doesn't have constraints around production quality.

[chadwhitacre]

Shuttleworth CEO on the fellowship program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pX2Kv-y_PE

[chadwhitacre]

"access to knowledge and information and education"

[chadwhitacre]

I wonder how current that is. Video dates from 2012.

[chadwhitacre]

(Because we're not really about access to knowledge and information and education. 😶 )

[chadwhitacre]

I think we should build this around open work.

[chadwhitacre]

Started a separate doc for the video lightning talk script.

[chadwhitacre]

I've asked a friend if he has a camera I can borrow.

[chadwhitacre]

He said to use an iPhone. :-)

@kaguillera makes the point that even if I rerecord a different video for this than for next week's lightning talk, I could/should try to write the content to highly overlap between the two as an optimization.

[chadwhitacre]

We should have a history part of the video, for which I think it makes sense to use the chart.

[chadwhitacre]

Pronounciation of Karien Bezeidenhout (she and I spoke three years ago; I recall that I was sitting on a park bench near the Brooklyn Bridge—a stunning view but a terrible connection!).

[chadwhitacre]

video script

[chadwhitacre]

My plan is to write and record a video in the next two hours, and then use impress.js to add some movement to the video—as much as I'm able to get done before the deadline.

[chadwhitacre]

YouTube uses 16:9 aspect ratio players. The YouTube player automatically adds black bars to videos in the player so that videos are displayed correctly without cropping or stretching, no matter the size of the video or the player.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6375112

[chadwhitacre]

Same page ^^^

If you upload a 16:9 video at its original aspect ratio (1280x720 recommended) ... The video will fill the YouTube widescreen 16x9 player.

[chadwhitacre]

GIF doesn't quite do it justice.

[chadwhitacre]

Free music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGhLmWn3G60

[chadwhitacre]

https://soundcloud.com/ck_quasar etc.

[chadwhitacre]

https://soundcloud.com/ck_quasar/rain

[chadwhitacre]

I queried people we charged on June 19, 2014 (just before #319 came to a head), and came up with this list of 20 companies (sorted by amount charged, descending):

1. andyet
2. stripe
3. balanced
4. MaxCDN
5. digitalocean
6. engineyard
7. Bountysource
8. cos.io
9. khanacademy
10. Lincoln Loop
11. breezeweb_ca
12. [anonymous_giving]
13. Team Rubber
14. getsentry
15. openconcept_ca
16. Runscope
17. hypatiadotca
18. CodioHQ
19. Kitely
20. card.com

Off the top of my head, I know that list is missing at least two:

1. Klarna
2. TeeSpring

[chadwhitacre]

Dozens? Really?

So not dozens, no. 20+.

[chadwhitacre]

Maybe "a couple dozen," if we want to assume there are at least two more.

[chadwhitacre]

One is still giving.

[chadwhitacre]

Okay, I just did a first cut filming myself talking. I bet I went 10 minutes, the camera ran out of room after two.

[chadwhitacre]

Just finished a second take. I bought a program to unload files from an iPhone (iTunes is a mess for that 👿 ), leaving enough room for about 10:30. I was almost done! :)

Okay! Let's trim this in half ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG0x_Xc_c98

Feelin' good ...

[chadwhitacre]

Got it down to about nine minutes. I'm recording audio on my laptop for better quality.

n	starting timestamp	duration	segment
1	0:07	0:41	intro & thanks
2	0:48	0:28	overview
3	1:16	0:42	what is gratipay?
4	1:58	2:09	why is it interesting? open source funding crisis
5	4:07	1:34	now distribution - take-what-you-want
6	5:43	2:43	the really exciting thing - open organizations!
7	8:26	0:29	outro
	8:55

[chadwhitacre]

Started a scratchpad so I don't have to manually do timestamp math.

I've got (1) (2) (3) and (7) preeeeetty tight. The main content sections need work.

I'd really like to sync this up to a song if I can. Current pick. Added to scratchpad ... hmmm ...