This month’s Awesome Fellowship goes to Greg Kapfhammer, whose project is to hold a forty day data visualization contest, what he calls the Forty Day Visual Feast Project. Prizes to include a good deal of cold hard cash as well as quality large-scale reproductions of the winner’s visualizations. So get to reading Flowing Data again, get your Processing dusted off, and your volumes of Tufte all ready to go. Plans are still coming together and details for the competition will be announced on this blog. If you’re interested in keeping posted about this, join the project mailing list or drop an e-mail to tim AT timhwang DOT org. More details about the project available here. Greg describes: Have you ever seen a visualization of a data set, process, or phenomenon that took your breath away because it effectively explained a difficult to understand concept? The Forty Day Visual Feast Project (FDVFP) will support the creation of forty exciting visualizations that are designed to inspire and educate both scientists and artists. Upon its completion, the FDVFP will showcase forty images, a description of the steps that you can take to construct them for yourself, and a commentary on their strengths and weaknesses. The FDVFP site will include… read more →
The Awesome Foundation is extremely proud to award its first ever grant to Hansy Better Barraza, professor at Rhode Island School of Design and all around architect extraordinaire. Based on her interest in “bringing people together through design of public art and objects”, Hansy plans to design and build a huge hammock in Boston Common. The Awesome Foundation and Information Superhighway are co-hosting an award ceremony and party on Friday, August 7th in Cambridge, MA. Details are posted on Upcoming and Facebook.
Founded in June 2009, The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences awards $1,000 grants monthly to projects that advance the interest of Awesomeness in our universe. There are no requirements for applying, no definite criteria for deciding the winner, and no limitations beyond the necessity for being awesome. Winners receive the money in cash, check, or gold doubloons, no strings attached. To learn more or apply, get on over to http://awesomefoundation.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Following the call for the creation of the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences and an ensuing wave of retweets, the staff over here at Broseph Stalin have been busy trawling through the micro-trustee applications that floated through the ether to us. We’re still waiting on two more to get back to us (will be posted here as soon as we hear back from them), but I’m happy to announce today that the bulk of the micro-trustees have accepted their offers and we’re happy to go public with the inaugural board of the Foundation. They are: David Nunez (Dorkbot Boston) Reed Sturtevant (Director, Microsoft Startup Labs) Emily Daniels (Dorkbot Boston) Keith Hopper (Public Interactive Group, NPR) David Fisher (Web Ecology Project, Development Ninja) Erhardt Graeff (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society) Evan Burchard (Developer, Rocker) Tim Hwang (ROFLCon) Kickass. We’re pumped here at Broseph by the collection of organizations represented, and the e-mails we’ve already gotten to apply for micro-genius grants. We’ll be meeting up this week to get everything in place for the summer, and they’ll be information on how to apply for Awesome Fellowships shortly. Stay tuned… Update: as of this morning, we’re happy to announce… read more →
Cross posted from the original “Call to Awesome” on Tim Hwang’s blog. I’ve been babbling directionlessly about crowdsourcing Awesome for a little while now, but I’m glad to report that after some encouragement from the awesome folks at Dorkbot Boston and Betahouse — we’re finally getting off our behinds here at BrosephStalin headquarters in Boston. We’ve teamed up with the good people at Information Superhighway and are officially announcing today the creation of first (and only) chapter of The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences. And we’re seeking trustees to be a part of it. And, you might ask: what is the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences? I’m glad you asked. The idea is simple: create a monthly $1,000 grant awarded to a person doing things to forward the interest of Awesome. The money will be spent on a project, activity, or research, and it will be (intentionally) broadly defined. We don’t even really care if it’s for fun or for profit. We will never claim your intellectual property or anything like that, and anyone in the world is eligible. So long as you need the money and the idea is awesome, you will receive it with… read more →