Re: Thinking about putting together a grant to support development on LilyPond

[Brent Annable]

Just an idea: how about a Kickstarter project? Or has this already been considered?

Brent.

On 9 February 2012 12:08, Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> wrote:
> I've been thinking about the problem of sustaining LilyPond development
> long-term (and specifically the problem of obtaining enough money to
> support David K as long as he's interested).
>
> As I've thought about it, going after a grant seems the most logical thing
> to do.  So I looked into the National Endowment for the Arts and the
> National Endowment for the Humanities.  NEA has nothing that looks
> interesting, unfortunately.  However, NEH has two initiatives that seem
> interesting.  One is concerned with preservation; the other is concerned
> with improve digital access to collected materials.
>
> Guidelines for the preservation grant (which will probably be due in July)
> are shown here:
>
> http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/HCRR.html
>
>
> Guidelines for the digital humanities grants are shown here:
>
> http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/digitalhumanitiesstartup.html

Some comments:

I have tried getting grants from different EU and national bodies with
various partner institutions (including the one where Graham now
works, IIRC). My impression is that you need people (preferably many)
with lots of academic clout that can sign off on the proposal, since
LilyPond itself has little formal recognition. Also, for EU research
grants specifically, they were focused a lot on partnerships with and
things that helped small and medium enterprises, and we couldn't
invent a story around that.

As for these grants specifically: you will need to invent something
outrageously new involving LilyPond (now in its 14th year of
existence), to qualify for the "startup" grant; the collections
initiative looks like a better fit.

> A) Development of ly2xml
> B) Development of a lilypond scoring standard for the project, so that
> scholars would know how to compare scores.
> C) Development of score_ocr2ly, which would take a score pdf and turn it
> into .ly files matching the lilypond scoring standard

Heh.  This is a known problem, and the OCR part is very, very
difficult. It also has nothing to do with lilypond.

> So I'd like to ask the developers (and the users):  Does this seem
> interesting to you?  Is this something that is worth trying to put
> together?  Is anybody interested in contributing to a grant proposal?

I'd be happy to provide any references or recommendations for the
LilyPond project as a whole.

> If there seems to be enough interest, I'll visit with the music librarian
> at BYU, and see if there is any institutional interest.

I'd talk with someone from the local music/humanities department that
has experience with writing grants and the funding body.  Of course,
if you got grants in the past, that might be less necessary.

--
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen

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