Survey: Sources of support

At the Cyberling workshop in 2009, Working Group 6 (participants Mark Liberman, David Lightfoot, Anthony Aristar, Collin Baker, Helen Dry and Laura Welcher) was tasked with exploring how to support the creation and maintenance of this ongoing cyberinfrastructure for linguistic data. They conceptualized this in terms of a four dimensional matrix: (1) projects and activities that need support, (2) potential sources of support, (3) organizational structures through which support can flow and (4) general concepts and principles.

Under (2), the WG6 white paper notes the following sources of support:

Past and potential sources of support for Cyberlinguistic activities are government funding agencies (in the U.S. these include NSF, DARPA, DOD, NIST, NIH, DOE, NEH, NSAS, IMLS, and NLM); private foundations (e.g. VWS, Hewlett, Christensen, Packard, MacArthur, Moore, Sloan, Ford); corporations (including scientific project grants, in-kind donations, donations of linguistic resources and tools, and contracts for linguistic resources and tools to be published more widely); individual philanthropists; small-donor fund drives; direct commercial activities (selling data, tools, services, access, subscriptions, etc.); support from universities and colleges (space, computing infrastructure, staff and student support, release time, small research grants); pedagogy (data and tools developed for and/or in courses); and volunteerism.

The purpose of this post is to elicit information from cyberling blog readers about what sources of support have supported what kinds of projects. If you have worked on a language resource (broadly construed), what kind of support have you been able to secure for it, both in terms of initial start up and on-going maintenance?