Call for Mozilla Science Mini Grants, initial concepts due Nov 15th

Note that 3/9 of these grants went to GOSH community members last year!

Awards at Mozilla are designed to support diverse approaches to addressing the most pressing threats to Internet health. Through the Science Mini Grants awards track, Mozilla seeks to identify, support, and develop a community of leaders in the network with the aim to transform research and the culture around science to make it more accessible, transparent, and reproducible.

Thanks to the generous support of the Leona M. & Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, once again we are awarding small grants ($3,000 — $10,000 USD) for project ideas that foster innovation and ultimately lead to more robust prototypes and products by expanding and enhancing the community who are working open. For this round of mini grants, we are specifically looking for projects related to biomedical subject areas.

The TL;DR

  • Initial Funding Concepts (IFCs) due November 15th 2018, 5pm Eastern
  • Invitations to submit full application sent out by November 18th, 2018.
  • Final full applications due November 30th, 5pm Eastern.
  • Award notification will be made by December 30th, 2018.
  • Public awards announcement will be made February 1st, 2019.
  • Grant-funded projects or activities should take place between February 1, 2019 and August 30, 2019.

Check the website for more details and a link to the application.

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I am currently looking for contract work and am really tired of working on consumer products.

I do electronics and software and have a passion for designing user interfaces and computer human interaction in general. I already know KiCad, Eagle, Javascript, Python, C, C++, Haskell and can probably get up to speed on other languages and tools pretty quickly. Check out my GitHub profile for all my open source work.

If anyone wants to talk about putting together an application that includes a budget for paying me to work on software then I please get in touch. User interfaces for scientific equipment would be especially interesting to me.

@gaudi, I think you mentioned software to run the HiSeq2000 would be useful to quite a few people.

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@kaspar, we got one of these mini grant in the last round, and before applying we asked if we could use the grant to pay for people’s work, and we got this response:
“The grants are modest and meant for billable expenses, not so much for contractors, though you’re welcome to make a case for justifiable expenses in your application.”
They left the door open, but in the end we did not include any salary/contract because we didn’t want to reduce our chances of getting the grant.

These mini grants are really great in many aspects, but this ended up being a limitation because even in an “open science” project, contributions ended up being mostly from people already being paid for by an institution, or people financially able to donate their time (the ‘usual suspects’). This is something we think open science should help change, but we couldn’t use our funds for that. This was part of our feedback, so maybe (hopefully) they could change it.

I guess you could ask them first.

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Thanks for the heads up @gpereyrairujo. Would be good to get clarification from Mozilla on this. They don’t seem to stipulate anything against paying people in the details.

Hi Kaspar

Yes, the HiSeq2000 software would be great. Technically everything is there to turn any HiSeq2000/2500 into an open fluorescent scanning microscope and you could start right away. From GaudiLabs I probably could throw up like 2000 euro for this.If you need more, you could set up a WeMakeIt campaign and try to get the Science-Booster to double the money. https://wemakeit.com/channels/science . The question is how do we get the HiSeq over to your place? There is also John ( see https://forum.hackteria.org/t/hiseq2000-next-level-hacking/325/19 ) who wanted to work on it with students (coordination?).

Urs

Hello!

We also got one of these Minigrants and if your contribution in the project is specified from beginning in the budget it is fine to designate an amount of money to that contribution, and then get a simple receipt of it. But to sign a contract or something like this I am not sure, and probably the experience of Gustavo is clearer. I think that wouldn’t be the format.

It has been a wonderful experience for me and EITCHA! and I recommend to participate and bring this fund to leverage projects from our community. And maybe to bring it to more initiatives in the global south (more discussion about terminology in a thread in this forum which I have to find), where we have less opportunities.

Note that this call is for projects in the biomedical area (in a broad sense), which should still fit for many GOSH projects.

Thank you very much.
Salve!

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Discussion on the HiSeq Software project continues here:

Just to not clutter up this thread. Join if your are interested.