Before Hamvention, I wrote a grant application to ARDC for about $50K for operating our hamfest booth to show innovative Amateur Radio technology such as FreeDV and M17, expanding to more shows, and was hoping for more Open Source amateur radio projects to present. I had been funding this essentially out-of-pocket for years and was out of personal funds to do that any longer.
ARDC did not approve the grant, and suggested that I apply to one of their already sponsored projects to show in _their_ booth. At that point, FreeDV and M17 were sponsored by ARDC, so I transferred the Hamvention booth to FreeDV, and they allowed M17 to exhibit, and the result was essentially the same as if HamOpen was operating the booth. I plan to transfer the Hamcation booth to FreeDV as well, and at that point HamOpen.org will be out of the trade show booth business for now. We will be able to get booths when that changes. I wish we could operate it just on membership funds, but that’s not a reality at this time.
M17 is about to apply to ARDC for 2025-2026 funds and there is some question that they’ll get them. I feel that M17 is a critical project for Amateur Radio, and am helping with their paperwork, etc. I’ll report on what happens.
On the Open Source front, the Post Open effort has made a lot of progress. There is a prototype zero-cost license and paid license, and a rudimentary web site at https://postopen.org/ . We have a pro-bono law firm that will put legal solidity on the licenses that I wrote. I made an application to ARDC for about $200K to run this effort which they rejected as out-of-scope, although they made a grant to Software Freedom Conservancy in the same grant cycle. I will start collecting individual donations for the Post Open effort, although grants must provide most of its funding until it is ready to operate paid licensing – at which point it must operate outside of our non-profit. It will probably be a 501(c)6, which is the IRS structure for industry organizations that are not-for-profit but not charitable non-profits.
Of late, I have been talking with other granting organizations than ARDC. ARDC is the big fish in our little pond, with Yasme Foundation being one of the only other grantors specializing in Amateur Radio in general, and ARRL Foundation being specialized in just funding ARRL. ARDC works from a fund of about USD$137M, which they are attempting to preserve through investment income while granting the amount that IRS requires each year – which is potentially enough to eventually deplete their fund if they aren’t careful or lucky. They have enough grant applications per cycle now that they are rejecting many of them, and they have increasing expenses due to building a relatively large staff. But although ARDC is the big fish in our pond, among granting organizations ARDC is at most a medium-sized fish.
So, I started talking with the really big fish, and was surprised at how warm a reception I got. STEM and Open Source are important to many of them – Open Source is important to all of the ones that invest in scientific research now, as it’s become the software infrastructure of science, and they find themselves making grants to simply preserve the software of some finished research project. They see our Post Open project as a better way to deal with that. Soliciting from such grantors for Amateur Radio is also possible as long as there is a STEM connection.
I am about to start soliciting for individual donations for Post Open (not from the Amateur community, from the Open Source one) and there is a 3 or 4 month cycle to see if we’ll get grants from some of the new organizations I’m dealing with.