Let me tell you a thing or two about Shuttleworth Foundation:

In a way, they're nuts. In so many other ways, they are brave, admirable and simply brilliant. They are, in their own words, "looking for social innovators who are helping to change the world for the better", and when they find one, they offer a year's salary, take care of getting the innovator rid of his or her day job in favor of a fellowship, and help getting the innovator's project off the ground and in the air by enabling access to their network of good people. (I'm not sure, but I suspect the have their own MacGyver running around and non-violently righting wrongs around the world, too. Don't quote me on that, though.)

But that's not all

Once in a while, they ask their Fellows if they know about any change agents that would benefit from a somewhat smaller amount of money and effort, and call that the Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant. One of those is what I have received, in recognition of my work and purpose with Outstanding Experiments; for being open not only with what has been accomplished, but also with what has not been done, due to lack of money, inspiration or momentum.

The feedback I've gotten regarding this blog has been practically exclusively positive. (None negative, but a few persons have asked a few pretty neutral questions.) That's not bad for something I just had to do, to set my languishing ideas free, and hopefully sow a seed of inspiration in the minds of my readers. I thank my readers for that encouragement, and continue shaving experiments off my backlog, one at a time.

The grant is far from large enough to realize, for example, the Lava radiator, but more than enough to help in numerous other ways related to this blog. The first thing I'm going to get is a proper SSL certificate, and start migrating the whole columbiegg.com domain from insecure HTTP to HTTPS. It may look like a small and strange step, but I'm a believer in personal privacy, and making things difficult to eavesdrop, however insignificant they seem. More experiments will be improved by the help of Shuttleworth Foundation in the future; just wait and see.

Wishing and hoping and thinking

When I say Shuttleworth Foundation is kind of nuts, I mean that in the best way possible. I wholeheartedly support the idea of enabling social change without solely focusing on economic gain. I wish I had the guts to be that nuts, but I'm not quite there, though I do have an experiment or two queued up that tread that territory.