[uf-discuss] proposal for grants microformat (hGrant)

[Christopher St John]

I've been doing some work with software designed to make it easy for
foundations to get on the web, so I'm definitely interested. But... the
whole microformats thing will be much less painful if you become
familiar with "The Process" as soon as possible.[1]

The first thing you should know is that The Process only works (and
thus microformats can only exist for) things that are already commonly
published on the web. You can't make something up in advance of
broad usage and call it a microformat[2]. This is very strong constraint,
and means that many things that might make good semantic markup
are not eligible to be a microformat. This is frustrating, but brings some
very real benefits.


On 12/20/06, Eugene Eric Kim <eekim at blueoxen.com> wrote:
>
> There are existing databases of grants, the most
> notable being the Foundation Center (http://foundationcenter.org/),
> ...
> Some
> of the larger foundations (such as Hewlett, Mott, and Gates) already
> publish grants information
>

So, the first step would be to start collecting examples of how people
currently publish grants on the web. The more examples, the better.
In fact, there's not a whole lot of point in doing anything else until there
are some documented examples.


> The real opportunity, in my opinion, is
> working with smaller, community and family foundations.  With a critical
> mass of grants information published in hGrant, we could build an
> aggregator for searching, tagging, and studying this data.
>

Do any of the smaller foundations currently publish any information
on the web, in whatever format?


Good luck! Enabling a grant ecosystem that requires less manual
data entry would be very nifty.


-cks


[1] Ref http://microformats.org It could probably be a little clearer, but
if you schedule some time to browse around you'll get the idea. The
pages on existing microformats proposals are especially helpful.

[2] In theory, anyway. You could argue whether it's really true or not,
but I wouldn't. It never seems to lead anywhere productive.


-- 
Christopher St. John
http://artofsystems.blogspot.com