About
WDF
What
is the Web Development Fund?
The Web Development Fund (WDF), one of Web Lab's most significant and visible projects, is an open call for proposals which provides funding to committed new media innovators to create groundbreaking Web projects addressing public and/or private issues. Most WDF sites are hosted on PBS Online.
Proposals may only be submitted during an open-submission period. After an extensive evaluation process, a handful of projects are awarded either full or development funding. Web Lab works closely with the production teams and the completed sites are launched with PBS promotional support. In the first two rounds of WDF, more than 700 proposals were submitted from all over the United States and numerous foreign countries. Some of the Web's most innovative thinkers and producers sent in proposals and over the last two years the WDF has funded 11 projects.
The WDF is intended to provide support and visibility for innovative new projects that demonstrate the potential of the Web as a "many-to-many" medium capable of catalyzing new perspectives, new thinking, and new relationships between people. In the past, Web Lab has announced an open call for proposals.
This year we are adding sponsored tracks through our Partners Program. Each track will feature a specific focus and agenda. As in the past, however, The Web Development Fund will again underwrite independent Web projects that:
- make imaginative use of the Web's capabilities as an interactive, participatory medium
- explore both personal and public issues in new ways
- promise to seek fresh perspectives on complex issues
- put technology and design at the service of content
- are produced by people who care about the subject and know something about it
- are dynamic rather than static
- evolve over time and are enriched and informed by visitors to the site and/or a thoughtfully recruited mix of people with varying backgrounds and perspectives.
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