I've been contacted a team at the University of California that will be applying for a sizeable NSF grant to create a research institute. The focus of their application will be Theme 1: Human-AI Interaction and Collaboration. If they win the grant, some of the institute's funding would be earmarked for our FoC community. Why us? Well, the applicant feels that novel programming ideas will play a big role in future Human-AI interaction — even if said novel ideas are not AI-focussed themselves — and they want to support research toward that. Why us, specifically? We're an interdisciplinary group with diverse circumstances (industry, academia, indie, hobby), so we may be able to do more with the funding than a more homogenous/traditional group. With our participation, they can help a new kind of cross-pollinated, forward-looking PL-UI vision come closer to existence, and related ideas to spread. Also, apparently, they enjoy the Podcast a lot :) Worth saying up front: this application faces a big uphill battle, so don't get your hopes up. We've had a few community funding offers lately, and none have panned out (yet). But it's worth taking the opportunity to hone our messaging and goals. If (when!) one of them does come through, we ought to be ready for it. Here's what I need from you for this grant application: 1) Ideas for how we could use the funding. I'll share a few of my own in the replies to give you a sense of the scope and goals. I can't share exactly how much funding has been suggested, but pretend you had at least $5k/month to spend on the community — how would you spend it? 2) People to help administrate the ideas from (1). If you would be tentatively willing to do this, please DM me and I'll give you more details. I'll need at least one person for each idea, so if you're willing to help broadly, let me know and I can pick one of the ideas that otherwise doesn't have a potential administrator. This is non-binding, it's just an indication of interest. The deadline for this is super tight — they'll be moving to the next stage of the application on Monday. We need to get our thoughts together within the next 24 hours so I can synthesize them into a proposal tomorrow. Even if we aren't selected for this particular grant, I hope this discussion will be generative of ideas for things we could do if (when!) the community eventually receives funding, so feel free to keep the discussion going past tomorrow. We've had a few of these discussions already, and they've been very helpful for me when talking to potential sponsors / donors. Thanks everyone!

This is really awesome! I think these ideas are great already and I'll do my best to come up with at least 1 more idea today/tomorrow morning

a Tool for tought jam with prices? similar to this https://blog.repl.it/pljamresults

Why not also funding projects/research about use of AI for for future of programming? Maybe part as the "*Directly Funding Research*" proposal. For AI used as an help for HCI in programming like new ways to interact with programming artifacts (like Dynamicland and co) or to help manage and help understand programming artifacts (like Codist Ai and co).

The idea that I have: Can we build/develop FoC projects together in the open? Maybe organize it in regular hackatons where we use the budget to pay the participants?

Cloud/IaaS Resources Make infrastructure available — Need a virtual machine? Some lambda functions? Some storage? Keep it simple — have 1 account, with multiple access groups so a person/team can keep their work private if they like (or in the open, per Maikel's nice point above), and just pay the tab on that account (Of course some limits per access group, so one project doesn't consume more than X% or $X) I'd volunteer to help admin this idea

Thanks for the replies everyone. @Mariano Guerra — Thank you for the suggestion! Forgive me, I'm going to critique it <3. We discussed that idea quite a bit when Repl.it announced their langjam. It'd take a lot of incentive design work, and thinking about what would create the most supportive environment, to pull off a contest that, on net, benefitted the community. It might not even be possible to do a contest that is equitable. I get that it creates motivation, but I'm not sure that motivation is what holds people back here. My hunch is that we'd ultimately end up with something similar to the Directly Funding Research idea, combined with the Demo Days idea. But if I'm maybe missing a benefit, let me know!

Thanks @Ivan Reese !! And now fingers crossed!

Great job @Ivan Reese! As usual very clear, polish and well presented. I guess it is the best that could have been done in so less time. And reading all this future of our futurism is inspiring. 🙂 Hope this will do with this submission and, with or without this funding, it definitely shows a motivating path for the next of the community.

@Maikel — There are folks here who are doing FoC work at a startup (like Storyscript), or at existing company (like my work on Hest), so those forms of funding exist. But I don't know how many folks are in the situation you've described, where they receive government funding. I'd love to know more about how these EU funds work. I'm in Canada, and we have at various times had research funds, but the programs were not.. great, to say the least.

@Ivan Reese this runs until 2020: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/what-horizon-2020 . In a couple of weeks I have a session with my subsidy advisor who handles my request. I'll also bring up this topic, maybe there are some possibilities. Are there folks here that have there own company? I do actually, although its a one-person company (I work as a freelance developer focussing on frontend).

Do you know when you might hear about whether this was successful or not?

I do not know. I'm taking some time off at the end of the year, so in January I'll likely follow up with them. But I wouldn't be surprised if it were 6 months or longer before we knew the outcome.