GrantsFire and Foundation Transparency

Wednesday, November 7. 2007

I'm attending the Technology Affinity Group annual conference in San Francisco - a gathering of foundation technology leaders. Here's some live blogging notes on a session about GrantsFire - an edge aggregator of grant information.

What is GrantsFire?

a web site: http://www.grantsfire.com
a working group
a data standard initiative

The Site

search for and view awarded grants details

Why GrantsFire?
Comments from the audience:

a great source of info for grantseekers
info for grantees to see other similar work being done across their sector
inform grantmakers to see sector-based investments -> lead to collaboration
demonstrate the collective impact of a foundation's investment
trend monitoring

Why Do This in the First Place?
The foundatiion center has, for years manually collected and 'munged' grants data from participants - labor intensive and slooow - poor visibility into the real data

How?

any foundation publishes their grant data to the web in a standard format
register your grant feed with GrantsFire
GrantsFire spiders registered sites

Publishing Standards:

use standard XHTML tags (HGrant microformant)
RSS: use extended RSS format

Some of my thoughts:

This is a great initiative to increase transparency and open information sharing.
opportunity exists to extend standard to grantee outputs - so that a grantee could tag their outputs to a specific grant - and have grantsfire compile the documents, posts, photos, reports etc - wow
amazing to me that leading grant management database vendors don't automatically support this standard and provide the publishing service to their customers

Posted by Kurt Voelker in Collaboration at 14:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Influence covers innovations in communication, Internet technology and strategy to generate influence on important public policy issues. Chris Wolz manages this blog with the help of his colleagues at Forum One Communications, a web strategy/technology firm in the Washington DC area.