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by lacker 994 days ago
From the Processing Foundation website:

https://processingfoundation.org/

Every year, we support and sponsor programs that nurture diverse communities and their projects. Our programs include:

A Fellowship and Teaching Fellowship Program that funds exploratory, creative, and technical research

An Advocacy Program that partners with organizations for projects

Public events that provide platforms for collaboration between our contributors, such as panels and talks that spread the word about the need for equity in these fields

Summer programs to support emerging coders throughout the world

Other bits:

We invite you to meditate on digital fragmentation and infrastructure that lays its foundation through the global white capitalist, colonialist, and imperialist framework we live in today through our Land and Digital Acknowledgements.

Please consider donating to the Processing Foundation to help us advance the role of programming within the visual arts.

I guess the foundation money is mostly being spent on things unrelated to Processing itself. But, if this is what the people donating the money wanted to happen, who's to say that it's wrong? Or maybe nobody really knows what they wanted. It's a tough issue with nonprofit organizations because they can often just spend the money on whatever the management wants, which may not be what the donors or former management wants.

3 comments

> But, if this is what the people donating the money wanted to happen, who's to say that it's wrong?

Meh. It depends.

Sometimes, like in the case of Mozilla, people are mislead about what their donations are used for. "Donate to firefox" money goes to the Mozilla CEOs favourite political causes.

I'm assuming that in this case, due to the snipped you posted, donators are made aware that they are not donating to Processing development, but to the leaders' political causes.

I don't think spending the money on these outreach programs is wrong either. I will say it does show conflict in terms of what the Processing foundation should focus on.

It could be that many of Processing's donor's had the assumption it was being developed as a creative coding tool (which I think its excellent as). As far as being a tool to introduce programming, I don't think its bad, but there are better tools/approaches. Personally, I think starting with whatever the browser interprets is very accessible, and is very relevant to modern programming. Start with HTML, CSS and eventually move to turing-complete things, like Javascript. Don't jump right into Java or even Javascript.

> global white capitalist, colonialist, and imperialist framework

Perhaps it’s because I am an European, but I’m really astonished by the widespread diffusion of this kind of obtuse ideological furore in the US lately, especially in the academic world

The silliness has been dying down lately, fwiw. This feels like a bit of a time capsule from a few years ago.