The TNL.net Research Grant

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Today is my 35th birthday and I was wondering about the best way to celebrate this on the site. The way I’ve decided to do so is to announce the launch of a new research grant fund: The TNL.net Research Grant.

Genesis of the idea

The TNL.net research grant was born out of my own experience over the years. When I was in college, I applied for a journalism grant of $500 to cover phone calls and research in paid databases like Lexis-Nexis. This money allowed me to complete several articles I would not have been able to do as a college student because I did not have the funds to do so otherwise.

What is the TNL.net Research Grant?

The TNL.net Research Grant is a $1,000 grant to fund interesting research that may require some money. For example, someone might want to do research using the Alexa platform but not be able to pay for the transaction costs associated with using the Alexa web service. Or someone may need access to certain resources that are behind a pay bridge. The TNL.net research grant is here to ensure that such issue is not the barrier to that research being done.

I am personally committing 350 dollars to kick off the fund (10 dollars for each year I’ve spent on earth) and hope that others will join me by following and forwarding the link to the TNL.net Research Grant pay page on Amazon. I’ve set the goal to a high of 10,000 dollars, which would allow for 10 grants to be made.

Applying to the TNL.net Research Grant

I’m still working on figuring this out but, for starters, I’ve got some ground rules:

• All data acquired through a TNL.net Research Grant will be made available to the general public through a Creative Commons “By Attribution Share-Alike” license
• An exact accounting of where every dollar was spent will be shared in the same fashion
• All research and all results will be distributed under the same license
• No piece of data or result from the research will be hidden from the general public
• The research results will have to be published in a format that is readable by all. No DRM should be used to protect it and all data should be distributed as widely as possible. As such, publishing it fully as a blog entry or set of entry is highly encouraged and even recommended if you are not publishing it in another form.
• All tools created as a result of this grant should also be put in the public domain.
• The research cannot last more than a month and all results should be reported within 30 days of receiving a grant.

These are the basics. Your proposal, which you can post in the comments section of this entry, will include: A description of what you are looking to investigate; a description of the resources you plan to use the money on; a description of other existing research in this arena (or prior art);

When I’ve raised $1,000, I will start posting the different proposal to this site and will ask my readers to comment further or ask for more evaluation of the idea. Hopefully, others around the blogosphere will get involved in discussing the idea of the research.

This idea will evolve over time but I think that it might be a good way to get some solid research funded in the online world. I hope TNL.net readers will join me in raising funds and defining the way to move forward on this effort.

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