It’s with great pleasure that we announce the recipients of the first CC Catalyst Grants Program. Out of a grant pool consisting of more than 130 applications, seven projects have been selected for awards up to $10,000 each, to catalyze projects that contribute to the commons.

Thanks to your generous support during the Catalyst Grants campaign, we raised almost $50,000, 100% of which will directly fuel the grant awards.

The applicant pool offered an impressive array of project ideas from around the world. We couldn’t be happier with the turnout and fantastic proposals from a variety of fields. Although we unable to fund more proposals this time around, we hope to run the program again next year and leverage our experience to raise a larger pool of funds so we can do still more. We also learned a lot about what makes a strong proposal and will share these guidelines with the community.

We encourage you to take a look at the remaining grant pool, and if a project catches your eye, you can leave the team a note on the wiki discussion page. Many projects are seeking specific expertise or support and would welcome the opportunity to work with others to make their idea a reality.

An enormous thank-you goes to the Catalyst Grants Review Committee, comprised of regional representatives nominated by CC Project Leads. Thank you, Hiram Meléndez Juarbe (Puerto Rico), Bassel Safadi (Syria), Paul Keller (Netherlands), Paul Kiwehlo (Tanzania), Jane Hornibrook (New Zealand), as well as Chiaki Hayashi (Asia Projects Coordinator) and the CC staff members for your thoughtful review. This process benefitted from your generous input.

Thank you as well to all the applicants for your efforts and great ideas, and thank you to those who supported the fundraising campaign that made this all possible.

With no further ado, here are the recipients of this year’s CC Catalyst Grants Program funds:

• #8: Arabic Open Educational Resources (OER) Platform
  o To build a fully functional online educational system that provides free sharing of educational resources.
  o Applicant: Jordan Open Source Association (Jordan)
• #9: Assessing the effect of license choice on the use of lexical resources
  o To measure the correlation of the openness of the license with the use of a WordNet (semantic net works similar to enhanced thesauruses) and create a server that will offer a unified, online interface to all open WordNets.
  o Applicant: Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies; Nanyang Technological University (Japan)
• #17: CC Commentary
  o To establish a collaborative, database-driven online commentary of worldwide scope for the six CC core licenses
  o Applicant: European Academy of Law and Computing (EEAR) and newthinking communications (Germany)
• #36 Creative Commons Latam Conference 2010
  o To host a two day regional conference where Latin American free culture communities and Creative Commons Latin America chapters will gather together to share experiences and discuss common projects (output to include publications)
  o Applicant: Bienes Comunes Asociación Civil (Argentina)
• #40: Developing a methodology to run Creative Commons license-based architectural competitions.
  o To build a methodology for running alternative, open license-based two-phase architectural competitions
  o Applicant: KÉK – Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre (Hungary)
• #57: Implementing a web site that will provide technical and legal support for Latin-American publishers of academic journals to satisfy open journal standards
  o To design, develop, and implement a website that will provide technical and legal support for Latin American publishers of academic journals to satisfy open journal standards
  o Applicant: Derechos Digitales (Chile) and Fundacion Karisma (Colombia)
• #127: etcc: remixing the visual arts
  o To organize a remixable art exhibition that seeks to explore ideas of creation and appropriation in the visual arts sector.
  o Applicant: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (Australia)