[kNews] Kendra gets EU funding...

[kNews <k-news@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear All,

Well, we did it. Kendra Foundation has received seedling EU funding for 4 
years as a partner in P2P-Next [1] along with the BBC, Pioneer, 
STMicroelectronics, the EBU and many others.
 

This is a really great opportunity for Kendra Initiative. The grant brings 
the project stability and solidity. It's a recognition and validation of 
the goal of an open distributed marketplace for digital media. Many thanks 
to Mark Stuart of Pioneer for inviting us in.
 

NEED 25% MORE FUNDS

However, we need to raise 25% of the budget [2]. That's 61397.50 EUR over 4 
years. That's a really doable amount. At less than 16K EUR a year [3] it's 
a small amount to pay if we can get, say, 20 Kendra Initiative members a 
year donating a few hundred Euros each. Please contact me if you are 
interested.
 

The current grant means that Kendra Foundation can employ myself and Neil 
Harris (no relation) to really dig deep into content value chain 
interoperability issues. Specifically we will be working on Kendra 
Signposts [4] cross media metadata tools. We'll be liaising with content 
owners and service providers. And running trials and demonstrations 
throughout the period.
 

WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

We are also looking to raise funds for to develop the Kendra website using 
Drupal [5] CMS. We will already be using a small part of the EU grant for 
website development but, in order to really maximise on functionality (for 
the users: you!), we really need to bring extra people on board with Drupal 
skills. And that means having a dedicated website budget. Again, contact me 
if you can support financially or with Drupal skills.
 

Building the website using Drupal will give us a much more collaborative 
design environment where trials, forums, wikis, documents, profiles, 
relationships, tasks and feedback reside in a single trackable framework. 
Also, Drupal has built in multilingual support and many other new exciting 
technologies.
 

P2P-NEXT MEETINGS IN MILAN AND LONDON

I will be in Milan (April 14 and 15) and London (June 9 and 10) for 
P2P-Next meetings with a few days either side. So, please get in touch if 
you want to meet up and talk about the next 4 years and beyond.
 

Here's to the next 4 years! ;-)

Cheers Daniel

[1] http://www.p2p-next.org
[2] http://www.kendra.org.uk/wiki/wiki.pl?P2P-NextFinances
[3] 15349.38 EUR = 12213.10 GBP = 24225.90 USD
[4] http://www.kendra.org.uk/wiki/wiki.pl?KendraSignposts
[5] http://drupal.org


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