The Awesome Foundation: $1K grants every month in the name of awesomeness

by jonpierce • 17 years ago

84 40 17 years ago

100ideas2• 17 years ago

I would use $1000 to purchase lab reagents and host a class teaching participants how to sequence a short segment of their choice from their own genome - for free!

vlad2• 17 years ago

They are pooling their money together to entice smart, creative individuals of their choice to spend one month each at their coworking office by giving them recognition and paying them $1,000 to be there. This will be a great way to meet and learn from such people who they might not ever hear about or meet otherwise, never-mind work alongside for a month. It also gives the house some publicity as well as a list of cool people who were "guests".

noelchurchill• 17 years ago

How is it not helpful or useful??

Tichy• 17 years ago

Why not just run that class and ask participants to pay? I would gladly pay for such a class.

rms• 17 years ago

I would sell a kick ass PCR lab for 3500 if anyone is interested...

seldo• 17 years ago

How are they funding this? Is everybody just chipping in $100 a month?

jonpierce2• 17 years ago

Yup. Individual contributions of $100 a month pooled together.

kirubakaran• 17 years ago

How do I get in on the contributing group? [kirubakaran@gmail.com]

ggruschow• 17 years ago

Me too. Donate button please. If you've got a 501(c)(3), even better.

100ideas2• 17 years ago

Someone from boston should submit a proposal to manually curate the MBTA's scheduling information and produce a version in Google Transit Feed Spec: http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specificati...

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

someone from boston should also make a microsite, is_it_raining_in_boston.com

  def index( request ): 
    return HttpResponse('yes, damn it')

mahmud• 17 years ago

in Arc

(dfn indx (rqst) (rspns t))

eob• 17 years ago

Seriously. And why is it still 60 degrees.

My awesome idea is to move Boston to the Carribean

vegashacker• 17 years ago

I think this parenthetical is a typo:

  (> ~500 words for you precisionists)

myblake3• 17 years ago

Good call, I'll fix it.

Also just a warning the site seems to be under a bunch of load right now :-( We'll be keeping an eye on it, but sorry in advance if you can't get through.

pierattt2• 17 years ago

What's not clear to me is if the $1000 is actually supposed to help fund the Awesomeness, or if it's basically just intended as a reward for doing something Awesome. For instance, should submitted ideas be confined to something achievable within that budget? I assume not, but the whole thing could use a bit more clarity.

jonpierce2• 17 years ago

Either. We're keeping the whole thing rather open ended, at least to start. That said, we're happy to answer any questions and we'll add a FAQ to the site sometime soon. Also, for those in the Boston area, we'll host an information session at BetaHouse in a couple weeks.

pierattt2• 17 years ago

I can say that if this had the double-intention of functioning as marketing for Betahouse, it definitely worked on me. I have every intention of keeping track of your events, etc, from here on out.

Klonoar• 17 years ago

The source code for that page is most definitely not awesome. :(

myblake3• 17 years ago

As the author of said source I certainly agree, I put it together in about an hour. If you're referring to the fact it was running super slow for a bit that had more to do with overall just not anticipating how good my colleagues are at publicity, dreamhost shared servers, and some environment settings.

mpc• 17 years ago

really? what's wrong with it?

lars• 17 years ago

pagehtml.replace(RegExp(/\<p\>/,g), 'bigfatmonkeydick');

Huh?

myblake3• 17 years ago

gotta love easter eggs right? to be fair that function isn't called.

axod• 17 years ago

Seems like a great way to get people to give you tons of ideas on what to do yourself ;)

I'm not saying this is what's happening here of course...

tibbon3• 17 years ago

Believe me, we're all far too busy to do our own ideas, let alone anyone else's. In fact if anyone wants to take stuff off my plate, please do :)

davidnunez• 17 years ago

believe me, we don't want ownership over any of the ideas. we're also aware that "no-strings-attached" often is not, so I'll grant you that this may all seem rather suspicious. Honestly, I hope people get fabulously happy and can quit the day job off of the $1000 we're handing over. Doing that for somebody is my ROI. But even if all it does is lower the activation energy required for somebody to get off his/her ass and do something awesome or encourage already awesome people to keep going, I think we all win. We could use a little more unfettered joy around us, don't you think?

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

I think this is a great idea, and if I could I'd support a 5K and 10K grant for more complex projects.

Something I have noticed: people tend to do better under a little pressure.

So if you could have some kind of requirements, like regular emails, submitting a video of your work, or an online interview at the end, you might get better results.

Just a thought. Good luck with this!

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

I like the idea a lot. The font however, hurts my eyes.

jmonegro• 17 years ago

Could this be a way of taking ideas? Sounds a bit sketchy to me... specially since the domain is registered to an individual, and not a group/foundation...

iheartmemcache• 17 years ago

The Board of Trustees has a few people who are affiliated with reputable organizations (BetaHouse, Microsoft, etc). Seems legitimate to me.

tybris• 17 years ago

Anyone using the form should be ineligible. Modesty is awesome.

ddemchuk• 17 years ago

This seems like an interesting way to create a sort of "rolling YCombinator" if there was a little bit more money being tossed around. Say maybe giving out $3-5000 each month, creating 12 new business opportunities a year, each one launching in a somewhat timed fashion in sync with the others from other months.

pavs2• 17 years ago

What the hell?

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2422/3682531265_1ea4ddaa78_o....

pavs2• 17 years ago

Ok not sure why I am getting downmodded. But this warning actually pops up with AVG on betahouse.org everytime same with chrome. Anybody from betahouse bothered to check if AVG incorrectly blocking their website and issuing warning?

The Awesome Foundation: $1K grants every month in the name of awesomeness

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