[44net] Possible requirements for ARDC on the future grant process - initial grant ideas

Hello Phil, Everyone, I was curious what the process is going to be for this ~$50M US dollars (speculation on my part) grants? I would hope that ARDC will release a published document on specific criteria for anything to be considered. The vetting be an publicly available review process vs. something done behind "closed doors", etc.. I would imagine this criteria could include items such as: - Make a decision if grants need to revolve around amateur related networking topics or would it be anything generally for amateur radio - Monies should be put into category buckets and tracked against purposes like furthering the science, EmComm, communications/awareness/marketing, large orgs (AmSat, TAPR, etc). No one group should dominate in terms of granted monies. I imagine this will be difficult to do as any one ask might be far more expensive than many other little asks. - A fair share of monies must go non-US located grants as AMPR must be more than a US thing - Monies should not go to any government entities in any country - Monies should not go to for profit corporations. Examples include say MFJ, Icom, Elecraft, HRO, Kenwood, Tyt, Motorola, etc. - Monies should not go to HAM representative organizations like the ARRL, RSRB, etc. One possible exception could be around spectrum defense but this is iffy in my mind - Monies should not go to "big gun" contesting groups, DX expeditions, etc (IMHO because they already have money compared to many many others) - Monies spent on either software or hardware related projects must be open source based on some agreeable license (not necessarily GPLv3, etc) - Grant recipients must publicly submit formal requests confirming their goals and how they meet XYZ requirements. They must receive auditing on X interval of how the the money has been spent - Any one grant must not exceed X US dollars - Any one specific entity should not get more than X grants per quarter and/or year - Set a budget of no more than X US dollar be spent in a calendar quarter and a calendar year - The ARDC 501.C books and balance sheet should be publicly posted and updated on a quarterly basis Those are just some of the ideas that come to mind but I'm sure that many other criteria should be considered. Btw, I would like to formally see the consideration of a few grants ideas: 1. Allocate some amount of budget to properly over see this whole process. It's going to be a lot of work and I believe those people should be compensated for it. This level of compensation should be fully disclosed and be "minimally" fair. 2. Develop and operate a redundant BGP backhaul for 44.0.0.1 beyond just our current UCSD provider. Doesn't have to be anything super fast but must be better than our current 0 Kbps 3. Hire a focused development team to have the Linux AX.25 stack repaired due to the various errant commits that have been getting committed. Modern linux kernels now have various bugs and toxicity that is rendering native Linux as unusable. Myself and many other HAMs can provide details but we don't have the expertise to correct these issues. I also believe this team should work with the Linux community to get proper unit tests added to the Linux development process so future toxic commits can be caught as part of the modern continuous development process. This and related topics should be moved to a different email list so interested parties can view and participate w/o bothering this core technical email list Just my $1.50 --David KI6ZHD Silicon Valley, CA 44.4.x.x/16 AMPR coordinator On 07/18/2019 09:19 PM, Phil Karn wrote: