from the Coalition for Networked Information, Dec. 10 2007:
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation today awarded $650,000 in prizes to ten not-for-profit institutions in the second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC).The Mellon Awards honor not-for-profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as cultural-heritage not-for-profit activities. The awards were presented at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the inventor of the World Wide Web.
After a worldwide, public nomination process, the ten recipients were selected by the MATC Award Committee, which included Berners-Lee, Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corporation), John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.), Vinton G. Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.), John Gage (Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.), and Tim O¡¦Reilly (Founder and CEO, O¡¦Reilly Media).
Additional information on the awards is available at http://matc.mellon.org. More information on the awards ceremony, including podcast interviews with some of the recipients, will be available at www.cni.org.
The 10 recipients are:
American Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY) for the development and release of the OpenCollection museum collection management system (www.opencollection.org).
Duke University for leadership and development work on the OpenCroquet open source 3-D virtual worlds environment (www.opencroquet.org).
Georgia Public Library Service of the University System of Georgia (Atlanta, GA) for the development and release of the Evergreen open-source library automation system (www.open-ils.org).
Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT) for the development and release of the Segue interactive learning management system.
Open Polytechnic of New Zealand (Wellington, NZ) for leadership and development work on several open source projects including the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (http://eduforge.org/projects/nzvle/).
Participatory Culture Foundation (Worcester, MA)
for the development and release of the open source Miro media player (www.getmiro.com).
Talboks- och Punkstkriftsbiblioteket (The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille: Enskede, Sweden) for the development and release of open source tools supporting the Daisy Project for talking books for the visually impaired.
University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana, IL): one award for the development and release of the Firefox Accessibility Extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1891); and one award for the development and release of the OpenEAI enterprise application integration project (www.openEAI.org).
University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario: www.utoronto.ca) for the development and release of the ATutor learning management system (www.atutor.ca).
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a philanthropic organization with offices in New York City and Princeton, NJ. The MATC awards are a project of the Foundation¡¦s Program in Research in Information Technology (RIT). More information about the MATC awards is available at
http://matc.mellon.org
.