Criteria

ELIGIBILITY AND AWARD CRITERIA

Any organization that satisfies the Mellon Foundation’s criteria for receiving grants is potentially eligible, including qualifying non-U.S. organizations.  To receive full consideration, the organization must have contributed its own financial and human resources to a software development project which meets all of the following criteria:

1. Is in public release (not just development) as an open source project, with source code actually available
2. Provides a direct and demonstrably significant benefit to one or more of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s traditional constituencies. These constituencies are: higher education, with a special emphasis on the arts and humanities; libraries and scholarly communications; performing arts; conservation and the environment; or museums and art conservation.
   
3. Meets the Foundation’s strict standards for excellence
4. Includes the development of intellectual property that is freely available to the academic community under one of the approved open source licenses.

One nominates a particular institution for its contributions to a particular project: both the institution and the project must be specified. Multiple nominations will be accepted, as will self-nominations. Please see the How to Nominate instructions for more information.

Nominees will be evaluated based on the importance to our constituencies of the open source project being supported and the importance of the organization’s support to the success of the project. Preference will be given to projects that benefit more and larger constituencies, demonstrate exceptional promise or performance, and meet particularly urgent needs. Furthermore, preference will be given to organizations whose relationship with an open source project exhibits some or all of the following characteristics:

• Successful recruitment of organizational partners into a sustained, collaborative development relationship
• Successful efforts to increase the benefits of the project by integrating or collaborating with other open source development projects, including the adoption or encouragement of open standards
• Strategic contributions playing unusually creative or vital roles in beginning, sustaining, or completing the project
• Voluntary assumption of a recognized leadership role in the implementation or governance of the project

When reviewing these characteristics, the Award Committee will take into account only those aspects of the organization’s contribution which are self-supported, excluding from consideration activities which are primarily funded by directed, external resources such as government or private grants, including grants from the Mellon Foundation.

Following Trustee approval of the Award Committee’s decision in mid-September, recipients will be asked to submit plans, developed in collaboration with the organization’s leadership, for the use of the award to further the organization’s engagement with open source development. It is expected that these plans will involve approximately a one-year time horizon and include provisions for a follow-up report to the Program in Research in Information Technology.