The Shuttleworth Foundation was established in January 2001 by

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

Mark Shuttleworth Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the development of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. In 2002, Shuttleworth became ...

as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. While there have been various iterations of the foundation, its structure and how it invests in social innovation, the current model employs a fellowship model where fellows are given funding commensurate with their experience to match a year's salary, allowing them to spend that year developing a particular idea. Notable past and present fellows include

Marcin Jakubowski Marcin Jakubowski founded Open Source Ecology (OSE) in 2003. Jakubowski is an advocate of open source hardware as a foundation for the open source economy - particularly distributed manufacturing, open source agriculture, and open source produ ...

(who develops the

Open Source Ecology Open Source Ecology (OSE) is a network of farmers, engineers, architects and supporters, whose main goal is the eventual manufacturing of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). As described by Open Source Ecology "the GVCS is an open techn ...

project),

Rufus Pollock Rufus Pollock (born 1980) is a British economist, activist and social entrepreneur. He has been a leading figure in the global open knowledge and open data movements, starting with his founding in 2004 of the non-profit Open Knowledge Foundation w ...

(co-founder of the

Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England an ...

) and

Mark Surman Mark Surman is a Canadian open internet activist and the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. He is a leading advocate for trustworthy AI, digital privacy, and the open internet. Before joining the Mozilla Foundation, Mark spent more tha ...

(now Executive Director of

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation (stylized as moz://a) is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

Funding model

The Foundation provides funding for people who have an unproven idea in the form of a 'salary', travel and office expenses. For every dollar invested by the Fellow in a project, the Foundation will put in ten or more, allowing the Fellow to own all Intellectual Property and processes once the active fellowship has ceased.

Projects

Freedom Toaster A Freedom Toaster is a public kiosk that will burn copies of free software onto user-provided CDs and DVDs. History The original Freedom Toaster project was sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth's Shuttleworth Foundation and built in Perl by Hamish ...

* Kusasa *

SchoolTool SchoolTool is a GPL licensed, free student information system for schools around the world. The goals of the project are to create a simple turnkey student information system, including demographics, gradebook, attendance, calendaring and repo ...

, student information system *

Serval Project The Serval Project (often referred to as Serval) is a project financed by the Shuttleworth Foundation, as well as various other organisations and accepting individual donations. It is headquartered at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Th ...

, for smart phone ad hoc networks * strong encryption for

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

* tuXlabs * FarmBot

References

External links

Shuttleworth Foundation website
Information and communication technologies in Africa Youth organisations based in South Africa {{org-stub