Duncan Chew discovered there is over 1,350 tonnes of dog waste to be disposed of every day in Australia – nearly half a million tonnes per year. Using this un-tapped resource, the project involves building a digester to convert the dog waste into a biogas. It will then be used in a Melbourne park in a public lighting installation as a community meeting place for use by dog owners and other visitors.

“In researching the scope of the project we were intrigued by the strong sense of community amongst dog owners that congregate at these parks,” says Duncan Chew. “We want to nurture this relationship and build a biogas fueled ‘campfire’ where people can come together at this unique meeting space.” The $1000 grant will be used to contribute towards the cost of building the poo-powered campfire.

Further updates on Poo Power! will be posted on the website: www.poopower.com.au.

After a hiatus, Awesome NYC is springing back with our April grant to 596 Acres. Here they are in their own words:

596 Acres distributes information about publicly owned vacant land in Brooklyn by publishing print maps, creating and hosting an interactive map, holding land use visioning sessions, and providing advocacy and support for community-based groups all over Brooklyn as they negotiate with city agencies for permission to use currently vacant and fenced-off lots for community-determined projects.

Since we tested our tactics in a pilot project in June 2011, three vacant and warehoused lots in Brooklyn have become official sites of community projects: 462 Halsey Street, Feedback Farms, and the Java Street Garden Collaborative; Myrtle Village Green and Patchen Community Square are nearly official, too. Twenty-seven other communities are organizing for control of different pieces of Brooklyn using our tools.

The April 2012 Awesome Foundation grant will be used to fund a dramatic extension to our current project by adding the publicly owned vacant lots in the other four boroughs to our site. This will give the communities in the rest of the city an idea of which vacant lots are owned by the city. It’s extra Awesome that this part of our project is funded now because without the map and data, we couldn’t make sense of vacant land in the other boroughs. The grant from Awesome will pay our hard-working programmer – who has been doing all work for 596 Acres for free for a year – to expand the online map’s capacity to handle data for the other boroughs. It will let our interactive map go ALL CITY. It’s hard to find funding for web development. It’s awesome that we have!

Simultaneously with expanding our online tool’s scope, we will gather the data for the rest of the city, create print for each borough, print them, distribute them in Visioning Sessions and post them on fenced lots as we have done in Brooklyn in collaboration with community-based organizations in the other boroughs. The whole ALL CITY ACRES pilot project has a budget of $6500. The Awesome Foundation New York has given 596 Acres another $3,000 towards the ALL CITY ACRES project’s physical manifestation. We are raising the rest of the money (for design, and printing and sign-making materials) by asking folks to contribute to our project on IOBY.org. Please do – even $10 will go a long way!

Little-known fact: five times a day, Awesome Foundation members from around the world face Boston (where it all began) and in a creepy, droning tone recite our mission statement in unison:

Furthering the interest of awesome in the universe, $1,000 at a time.

But sometimes an idea is so hilariously great that a little extra somethin somethin is in order. Enter AWESOME FOUNDATION – THE SHOW, where we give six times the $$$ and a kick in the pants to make your awesome idea happen ASAP. The pilot will be shot this spring and we’ll be awarding 3 mega-awesome grants to the awesomest of the awesome ideas.

So, if you’re submitting an idea to your local chapter and you’re feeling ballsy, throw your hat in the ring for the show as well (apply here) – we may invite you to come pitch us in person in beautiful downtown Burbank! We’ve got three big unmarked bags full of cash just waiting to be blown on your awesome idea.

1. Have a sake bomb: Asahi, chop sticks and Sake. We’re not sure how much of the contents made it to our mouths, as opposed to the table, floor or Erika’s jeans.

2. It was our second grant giveaway.

After mountains of sushi, not enough fried chicken, and much debate, we came to a decision as to who we would swing 1K across to.

httpmote. Mitch Denny is a dad, a husband, and also a dabbler in many visual & tech things. According to his application he thinks of 100 new ideas a week. This one in particular took our fancy:

Mitch hates remote controls. Funnily enough, so do we.

Mitch wants to build a system where he can use his iPhone to buzz open his garage door.

He also wants to share that buzzer with his friends and family, and even when he gets Jim’s Mowing to mow his lawn.

This would work by ‘sharing’ the remote via a text or URL, with a time limit so that when ‘Jim’ comes to mow his lawn, he can buzz open the garage door between 9am and 2pm and have access to the yard.

This seemed like it would make our life easier. So we threw some money at it.

We’ve been quiet here at Awesome Foundation San Francisco for a little bit, but excited to say that we’re back this month with a duo of amazing projects that we’re thrilled to be a part of. One is a dance party, another is a game festival. Presenting…

1) The Balloon Powered Dance Party

George, Will, and Issac are these three guys that we met recently who in their free time have been launching various items into the stratosphere using hundreds of helium balloons (see, e.g. a Christmas tree). They’ve teamed up with the good people over at the Million Fishes Art Collective in the Mission to do an installation that will fill their massive 22,000 cubic feet gallery floor to ceiling with balloons. We’re funding them to do as much.

This alone would be probably awesome enough to warrant an Awesome Foundation grant, but the added twist is that they’ve been playing around with little radio receiver/speaker/LED units that will fit inside a few hundred of these balloons, allowing them to broadcast some bumpin’ tunes and shine a weirdo ethereal light through the morass of inflated elastic that people will be allowed to wander through. The results, we expect, will thus be a dance party, and ensuing awesomeness. More details on this as they fix a date!

2) Come Out And Play

Come Out and Play (COaP) is a completely free annual games festival that turns San Francisco into an urban playground that’ll be running from November 16th to December 8th out of home base at SOMArts. Starting in New York in 2005, the festival has grown to SF, and we’re helping to fund the many game designers that they’re bringing together to produce a variety of activities throughout the month (see, for example, above: live action Frogger).

When the site updates, more information will be available here as the team continues to bring together all the logistics on it. Until they, you can track them on the Twitter and Facebook here.

Ecstatic to have both of these projects on board! We’ll update here as the details continue to come together for each of them, and we’ll look forward to partying and/or gaming with y’all shortly.

On the 3rd anniversary of the first meeting of the Awesome Foundation, we are having a two-part summit to celebrate, discuss, and hack on our founding principles: peer-to-peer giving, democratizing grants, and making our communities more awesome.

Awesome Summit: Assemble (July 21st-22nd) will be a meetup and workathon for Awesome Foundation affiliates ONLY. Representatives from each of our chapters will gather to meet each other, share advice and experiences, and work on shared resources to help spread our model even further. If you’re a member of an Awesome Foundation chapter and would like an invite, please email us.

Awesome Summit: Connect (July 23rd) is open to the public and will extend the discussion to the wider community of people who are experimenting in the philanthropy/community development space. Join representatives from tons of organizations like Kickstarter, DonorsChoose.org, and New Urban Mechanics in discussing issues like decentralized organizations and open brands, encouraging engaged donors, and the legal and political infrastructure we need. We want this to serve as a launching point for collaborations between these various organizations, and as a place to discuss the broader questions facing all the new organizations that are emerging in this field.

We’re currently looking for sponsors and volunteers of all levels to help us put this together. Huge thanks to the Knight Foundation for being an early sponsor, and to the Center for Civic Media for hosting us! If you believe in awesomeness, consider joining us!

Picnic baskets, blankets, kites – all the makings of a classic picnic, but on a massive scale. Baskets as big as a sofa, Paul Bunyan-sized sandwiches and enough grapes to make Caesar blush. It’s a giant picnic in size, scope and mission. There will be food, games and an open invitation for anyone and everyone to stop by and meet their neighbors.

Here’s a few more awesome facts about these two picnic-neers :

1. They are improvisers at the amazing Upright Citizens Brigade (clearly they know how to have a good time!)

2. Have you heard of Minutiæ ? If you haven’t you should check this brilliantly satirical magazine that Danny and Farley co-edit!

3. They’re simple folk (in a good way):

We’re not about making a political statement or saving the world, we’re just about bringing people together for some really awesome giant picnic shit.

So… stay tuned for details on some really awesome giant picnic shit!!!

Our recent recipients for February are working on the first episode of a gothic play/audio tour that will explore the Chinese heritage of Surry Hills, an inner-city suburb in Sydney now pretty well gentrified, with a great selection of restaurants, cafes, bars, pubs and designer retail. But it wasn’t always this way. As Mei Tsering, one of the writers/developers from the project explains,

“The setting of the sound walk will be in contemporary Surry Hills but will go back in time to the early 1900s of plague quarantines, (when) rat catching was a lucrative job and the war was seen as a ‘restricted holiday’ out of the Surry Hills slums. The streets were run by fashionable young gang members and the Chinese living in the area were a dying community following restrictive immigration policies and problems with gambling and opium dens.”

“The walk will follow two cousins of Chinese descent as they try and find the home of their ancestors. They hope to make an offering to be rid of a hungry ghost troubling their families. Hungry ghosts are spirits that return to take what they can if sufficient offerings haven’t been made by their living relatives.”

We can’t wait for episode 1!

Erika convinced everyone to trek Northside to drink wine and eat a lot, at Hell of the North, in Fitzroy.

Despite raised eyebrows from the guys at the tapas menu, the food was insanely delicious, and the company, a whole lot more.

Cheryl brought along her friend Steve, the man responsible for launching a Lego shuttle into space (awesome). He gave us a quick run down on an up and coming plan/invention he has going on. If you’re into cool start ups, you should check out Steve’s new project, or at least the hype for it.

Tom and Jo from Big Scary were off doing their thing overseas so sent in their votes the night before – kudos for organisation skills.

The winner of our our first grant was the cool dudes at Son Valise. They turn old school suitcases and the likes into functioning jukeboxes. If you haven’t heard of them already, have a look at their shop on Etsy. Then go on the best picnic you’ll ever go on.

They are planning a ridiculously cool project involving new jukes, new music, and some of Melbourne’s – if not Australia’s best talent. We can’t tell you much now, but we will be sure to let you know how it all goes.

So yes, we are giving them $1,000. Because we think they’re awesome.

And we’re done. See you in April.

A2.