Extra! Extra! The Institute on Higher Awesome Studies is tickled pink to announce that we’ve been awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to start the first ever Awesome Foundation around journalism and news. We’d like you to meet Awesome News Taskforce, a regionally-rooted and topic-based Awesome Foundation that will be nurturing small, awesome innovations in community news in the great city of Detroit. We’re now starting the process of looking for trustees—the 10-15 brilliant people at the core of the News Taskforce who will make monthly decisions on what they think is best for their community. Ideal trustees are innovative, enthusiastic, hard-working, and widely-connected people. In assembling this taskforce, IHAS seeks a balance of diverse professional backgrounds and sectors, genders, races, and ages that reflects the city it intends to serve. If you have suggestions, please let us know!
Greetings, all! Just wanted to drop a line out if you happen to be headed to the SXSW Interactive Festival next week. The Institute on Higher Awesome Studies is officially hosting its second annual global meetup of Deans, micro-trustees, and friends of the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences at the festival. Currently, it looks like we’ll be having trustees hailing from the following chapters: AF-Boston AF-San Francisco AF-Berlin AF-Sydney AF-Austin Should be a fun time hanging out. We’ll be meeting up for drinks and food on Saturday, March 12 at The Ginger Man in Austin, TX at 2:30. Even if you’re not a current member of a chapter, definitely stop by! And, if you’re so Facebook inclined, the full invite is here.
Welcome to the new Awesome Foundation website! While it’s still a work in progress, we hope it does a better job of conveying what the Awesome Foundation is all about. In particular, we wanted to make it clear that what started as a simple idea in Cambridge, MA last July has grown well beyond Boston’s borders and is becoming a nationwide – and perhaps soon international – movement. When we started this thing, we knew we were in for a fun ride. I mean, really, how could you not love reviewing submissions about cotton candy cannons, giant guitars and laser tractor beams?! But we were blown away by the immediate response from friends in other cities who wanted to start chapters of their own. We figured we’d better give it a few months to work out the kinks first, but Providence opened up shop in October, New York City followed closely behind in January, and now as we turn the calendar to April, San Francisco is raring to go. And that’s not counting the handful of nascent chapters that you may hear about in the coming months, or groups like ScaleWell who are applying the same model to entrepreneurship. We’re… read more →
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 →