Digital Education

Digital Makers Fund: We've Launched!

Tom Kenyon - 09.11.2012

Phew - by the time you read this we will have launched the Digital Makers Fund.  A £225,000  open call for ideas to significantly increase the number of young people who participate in digital making activities.

All the details are here.  You should look it up. The gist is we're looking for initiatives that have the potential to reach thousands of young people and to fund partners who are going to make a lot of noise about the work they're doing.

The Digital Makers Fund is financed through a partnership between Nesta and Nominet Trust and with a generous contribution from Mozilla. And we all hope it's the first of several open calls to support Digital Making; I'm already working on a killer fundraising plan.

It's important to note the Digital Makers programme is not just about the fund. Through this programme we hope to help co-ordinate a broad partnership or consortium of organisations (big and small) that share the same values and promote digital making.  We think that by working together under what Mozilla's Mark Surman calls 'a big tent' we can amplify our voice and impact.

Founding partners of this consortium (at the time of writing) include:

Nesta, Nominet Trust, Mozilla, O2 Think Big, Raspberry Pi, O'Reilly, Decoded, Apps for Good, GoTo Foundation, Coding for Kids, Games Britannia, Technology Will Save Us, London Knowledge Lab Innovations and NextGen Skills. We're hugely excited about bringing together this inspiring group of organisations and the many others that we're talking to and working with to promote participation in digital making activities.

Our next steps include creating a brand identity for this merry band of brothers, a campaign to promote our message directly to young people and a website to make it easy for a young person who wants to get involved with digital making to find the right resources and contacts.

At this year's Mozilla Festival (9 - 11 November) the key message of the festival will be 'Join Us' and help young people to be creators, not simply consumers of digital technologies.

If you want to get involved you can complete our expression of interest form or email me at tom.kenyon@nesta.org.uk