I want to share the announcement below with CNI-announce subscribers, and to urge you to nominate worthy projects for these awards. The Mellon Foundation has assembled a stellar group of reviewers who will be well-known to the CNI community.

I'm also delighted to note that the plan is for Mellon to make the first set of awards at the Fall CNI Task Force meeting in December 2006.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

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Tuesday, May 16, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Mellon Foundation Announces Awards for Open Source Software

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is pleased to announce today a Call for Nominations for the 2006 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). These awards, to be bestowed for the first time at an international technology conference in the Fall of 2006, will recognize not-for-profit organizations that have demonstrated exceptional leadership in the collaborative development of open-source software through the contribution of substantial, self-funded organizational resources to the open-source project for which they are nominated. The nomination period ends August 15, 2006.

MATC awards will be made at two levels-$25,000 and $100,000-for significant contributions to collaborative, open-source software development that serves one of the Foundation's traditional constituencies. The level of the award will depend on the scale and significance of the nominated project. Any U.S. or foreign organization that meets the Foundation's legal criteria for receiving grants and its strict standards for excellence is eligible for consideration. The Board of Trustees of the Mellon Foundation has authorized multiple awards at each level.

MATC recipients will be selected by an Award Committee consisting of:

• Mitchell Baker, President, Mozilla Foundation

• Sir Timothy Berners-Lee KBE, FRS, FREng., Director, World Wide Web Consortium; 3Com Founders Professor of Computer Science, M.I.T.; Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton

• Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President & Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.

• Ira Fuchs, Vice-President, Research in Information Technology, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

• John Gage, Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

• Tim O'Reilly, Founder and President of O'Reilly Media

• John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.; Former Director, Xerox PARC

• Donald J. Waters, Program Officer, Program in Scholarly Communication, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The full text of the Call for Nominations is available now, at

Mellon Foundation

The Mellon Foundation makes grants to actively unlock the power in the arts and humanities that helps connect us all.

Founded in 1969, with offices in New York City and Princeton, New Jersey, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a philanthropic organization with traditional constituencies in higher education (with a particular interest in the arts and humanities), museums and art conservation, performing arts, conservation and the environment, and public affairs. Among the Mellon Foundation's signature technology projects are the online academic journal repository JSTOR and the digital art archive ARTStor; the Foundation also funds a variety of open-source software development projects in higher education and other not-for-profit sectors.

For further information, please contact:

Christopher J. Mackie Associate Program Officer Research in Information Technology The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 282 Alexander Rd. Princeton, NJ 08540 609-924-9424 646-274-6351 (fax) cjm@mellon.org http://rit.mellon.org