Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration Announced

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation today awarded $650,000 in prizes to 10 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. More information on the awards ceremony, including podcast interviews with some of the recipients, will be available online beginning 11 December.

After a worldwide, public nomination process, the 10 recipients were selected by the MATC Award Committee, which included Berners-Lee, Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corp.), 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). The awardees, prizes, and projects for which they were recognized are as follows:

• $100,000 to the American Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY: www.movingimage.us) for the development and release of the OpenCollection museum collection management system (www.opencollection.org).
• $100,000 to Duke University (Durham, NC: www.duke.edu) for leadership and development work on the OpenCroquet open source 3-D virtual worlds environment (www.opencroquet.org).
• $100,000 to Open Polytechnic of New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: www.openpolytechnic.ac.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/).
• $50,000 to the Georgia Public Library Service of the University System of Georgia (Atlanta, GA: www.georgialibraries.org) for the development and release of the Evergreen open-source library automation system (www.open-ils.org).
• $50,000 to Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT: www.middlebury.edu) for the development and release of the Segue interactive learning management system.
• $50,000 to the Participatory Culture Foundation (Worcester, MA: www.participatoryculture.org) for the development and release of the open source Miro media player (www.getmiro.com).
• $50,000 to Talboks- och Punkstkriftsbiblioteket (The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille: Enskede, Sweden: www.tpb.se) for the development and release of open source tools supporting the Daisy Project for talking books for the visually impaired.
• Two awards of $50,000 each to University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana, IL: www.illinois.edu): 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).
• $50,000 to University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario: www.utoronto.ca) for the development and release of the ATutor learning management system (www.atutor.ca).
  

Additional information on the awards will be available online beginning 10 December. Nominations for the 2008 MATC awards will also be accepted at that site, beginning 12 December.