Awesome Ottawa's reaching around the globe in search of awesomeness. The group, which awards monthly grants to projects it deems awesome, named Australia’s Lauren Gawne its December recipient.
The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences was cooked up in Boston in 2009, and is “devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe,” according to its website. Since the original group was founded, word has spread, branches have popped up around the world, and each works independently to further and support awesomeness in their communities.
Here’s how it works: groups of 10 like-minded people (called trustees) each contribute $100 each month. People interested in Awesome Foundation grants in Ottawa submit 500-word applications. The group then chooses a project or creator to receive the $1,000 grant. Deciding who receives the grant is somewhat fluid, but winning projects are those that, in general, are deemed to be inspiring and, you guessed it, awesome.
December’s Ottawa winner, Lauren Gawne, is a research student at the University of Melbourne in Australia. She's documenting and digitizing the Kagate language, which is spoken by only one thousand people living in Nepal. (She has also done an academic analysis of internet "LOLspeak," by the way.)
Lauren Gawne on Lolcats
“The loss of small, endangered languages is a global problem, and it's nice that I can team up with some enthusiastic people across the globe to try and at least make a small change for a group of people,” says Gawne.
Emily Daniels was a member of the original Boston Foundation, and is now an Ottawa trustee. She says that the trustees were taken with Gawne’s project from the get-go.
“Serendipitously, Lauren applied specifically through the Ottawa chapter, and serendipitously our group has a lot of members who feel strongly towards preserving endangered languages and LOLcats. You may call it fate, or divine intervention, but we called it awesome,” says Daniels.
Ottawa‘s branch of the Awesome Foundation was founded in May 2010, and past recipients have included, among others: Phone Books to Mushrooms for Food and Art, a community art project that uses reclaimed phone books to build living sculptures that produce food for various communities; an interactive murder mystery event; and the 100 Strangers Project, which consisted of 100 subjects being photographed and interviewed.
November’s winner, Anne Patterson, is the founder of Hello Ottawa, a website which profiles regular Ottawans.
“I do long-form, in-depth interviews with people where we talk about their lives, how they came to be in Ottawa, their thoughts about the city, and anything else that comes up. I also photograph my participants somewhere in the city they feel is relevant to or representative of their lives,” says Patterson, who will use the grant towards transcription services, which will allow her to catch up on a backlog of interviews she's accumulated.
Daniels says the group plans to continue to recognize Ottawa as a place where awesomeness thrives.
“I'd love it to keep going and gathering momentum, so that we can reach more people who need the spark to set off their micro-brilliance.”
On July 31, 2010, OpenFile contributor Travis Boisvenue interviewed Cate Huston, Awesome Ottawa's former "instigator of awesome", about what was then a very new project. The interview aired on a show called Around the Block on CHUO 89.1 FM.
