Reboot Grants - Organising Page

This is the organising page for the Reboot 11 'Action Grants'.

This page lists the Reboot Action Grant recipients, the amounts allocated, a detailed account on the how the grants recipients were selected, how the allocation process was run, and links to pages describing the individual recipients in more detail.

The original text of this proposal page is archived at the end of this page

Updates throughout the year

The purpose of the Reboot Action Grants is to enable and support 'action' - I'll keep these pages updated as we get more news as our grants are turned into action.

Reboot action grant recipients

First up - the final allocation

Aiducation - €850
Aiducation awards merit-based high school scholarships to bright and needy students in developing countries who don't have access to high school education. Full page.

Baisikeli - €1,000
A bike rental business in Copenhagen who use their income to deliver second hand bikes to African villages. Full page.

Museo Aero Solar - €450
Museo aero solar is a flying museum, a collective artwork; a solar-energy air balloon, completely made up of reused plastic bags, with new sections being added each time it travels the world. Full page.

Open source anti counterfeit system for drugs and pharmaceuticals - €1,100
An idea to create an SMS based counterfeit check system based on a numeric encryption code check (just like a mobile refill) to create unique ids for drug packaging from trusted sources. Full page.

Room to Read - €1,600
Room to Read partners with local communities throughout the developing world to provide quality educational opportunities by establishing libraries, creating local language children's literature, constructing schools, and providing education to girls. Full page.

How the grant applicants were selected & allocated

1) Day One - Getting candidates for the Grants

Supporting Reboot11's theme of 'Action', the €5,000 funding for t-shirts and conference 'schwag' was turned over to form a grant fund for up to 5 recipients; people, projects, organisations or ideas that personified the Reboot11 theme of 'action', and reached beyond the confines of Reboot and it's local environs.

It was also important that all of us, as Rebooters, had a way to participate in the grant process and allocation.

So, on Thursday, the Reboot team printed a huge, blank poster in the main hall, asking for ideas for grant recipients. This filled up with ideas as the day progressed (photo here: www.flickr.com/photos/tonz/3665674613/ ), and we took the poster down at the end of Thursday, and I grabbed a few Rebooters to review the ideas.

We ran the proposals for grant recipients through two rounds of selection:

i. Did the suggestion:

• meet the theme of action?
• have a wider reach/impact/location than the local Reboot/CPH 'crowd' ?
• sufficiently explained/detailed to evaluate?

ii. Weighted scoring

Once the initial review was done, the judging panel had a short list of eight proposals - they then discussed each of these in more detail (with me adjudicating). Each person then gave the proposals a score out of 10, which resulted in this breakdown:

1. Baisikeli - 37
1. Room to Read - 37
3. Aiducation - 32
4. Open Source anti-counterfeit system for drugs & pharmaceuticals - 28
5. Museo Aero Solar - 26

6. Lab in a Box - 24
7. Royalty Oaks project - 23
8. Protonet - 21

2) Day Two - Allocating the Grants

On Friday morning, I distributed a full €5,000 of €10 'Action Euro' notes (apologies to Thomas, btw, who had no idea what I was up to in this regard) to Rebooters.

In the afternoon, we had a table near the main entrance, with the five final grant recipients detailed on posters, with bowls enabling each Rebooter to allocate their '10 Action Euro' note (this was a single allocation, it couldn't be split up).

We closed allocations just before Bruce Sterling's closing talk (4pm?).

I then split the counting task with another person, and we cross checked each-other's counting.

Rebooters had allocated €2,910 across the 5 grant recipients, so we had 59% of allocation intention (higher than most EU election turnouts :-).

At the after party I asked a maths geek (I was running on empty brain by then), to work out the proportional allocation of the remaining €2,090, (the 59% of 'real' allocation meant this was statistically valid), giving final amounts of:

• €1,600 - Room to Read
• €1,100 - Anti counterfeit drug label concept
• €1,000 - Baisikeli
• €850 - Aiducation
• €450 - Museo Aero

Phew!

Thanks!

First of all, thanks to Thomas for the Grants concept, and the wonderful Reboot crew for sorting out the logistics and cash handling aspects of this Grants process.

Thanks to the Rebooters who stayed up well past their bedtime on Thursday night, helping out with the recipient analysis (you know who you are!), and thanks to Keith Brophy and Simon Wheatley for their currency cutting skillz. Kudos to Marcin Ignac for designing the Action Euros.

And most of all, thanks to all the Rebooters for the fantastic ideas for grant recipients, and the involvement in allocating grant funds on Friday - told you they weren't flyers! (and well done for not trying to spend the Action Euros in the bar!

It's great to know that we've all played a part in helping kids read, transport people on hospital bikes, kick start a concept to support safe medicine use, support a child's education and fly ballons across the world!

Cheers everyone!

Original Proposal Text

It's a great idea - grants will spread Reboot's philosophy and goals beyond the event itself, and support our communities.

That's where we come in - as Rebooters, it will be up to us to decide how to award this grant fund. Thomas has asked me to organise/curate the process, hence this page.

So, to sum it up - it's our money, and we get to decide how to award it (in the context of grants). We need to come up with ideas on well, pretty much everything!

So, let's spend the next few days figuring out what a Reboot Grant program should be - and then we can run voting/meetings/whatever at Reboot itself, and make some announcements (or even awards?) at Reboot on Thursday/Friday.

*PLEASE ADD YOUR IDEAS AS COMMENTS IN THIS PAGE...*

Here's an initial plan:

*Sunday 21st -> Wednesday 24th: Ideas, discussion, design*
Suggestions on what do do, format, amount of awards, pledges:

• Volunteers - help me out with this (particularly )
• What projects, people, ideas, organisations, schools, places should we think about awarding a grant to
• Or should we try and run a competition?
• Can we combine the cash with pledges of skills from Rebooters?

*Reboot Event, Thursday 25th and Friday 26th*
Activities:

• Make some concrete decisions
• Mass ideas session (all 500 of us writes down ideas)
• A meeting or two
• Some announcements

Some basic structure:

The Grant Fund

• There will be a pool of c. €5,000
• This is likely to be split into chunks (maybe not of equal value)
• Let's try and grow the money - personal and org donations welcome!

Skills/Support as well as money

• Donations of advice/support/tech skills would be wonderful

Themes

• grants should represent the philosophy of Reboot
• fit this year's theme of action