Second Annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration Announced

NEW YORK, NY – The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has announced the second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC).  The Mellon Awards honor not-for-profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities.

The Program in Research in Information Technology of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation invites nominations for the 2007 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). In support of the Program’s mission to encourage collaborative, open source software development within traditional Mellon constituencies, these awards recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development.

The MATC awards provide the recipients with opportunities to strengthen their commitment to inter-organizational collaboration and open source software development. Awards are given at two levels: $50,000 awards to recognize important organizational contributions to open source projects which currently or potentially provide significant benefits to at least one traditional Mellon constituency; and $100,000 awards to recognize highly significant contributions to open source projects offering larger benefits to more or larger constituencies. Multiple awards may be bestowed at each level, at the discretion of the Award Committee and the Trustees of the Foundation.

The awards will be presented at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington, DC on 13 December 2007, by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the inventor of the World Wide Web. The recipients will be selected by the MATC Award Committee, which included Berners-Lee, Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corporation), John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.), Vinton G. Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.), John Gage (Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media).

Information on last year's winners can be found at: http://matc.mellon.org/winners/winner-2006/.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a philanthropic organization with offices in New York City and Princeton, NJ. The MATC awards are a project of the Foundation’s Program in Research in Information Technology (RIT).