Overview

The Processing Foundation has a broad mission, but we take specific action. We're charged with developing free, open-source software tools for the visual arts. Our goal is to promote software literacy within the visual arts and to promote visual literacy within technology. We act by developing and distributing the Processing software; both the core Application Programming Interface (API) and the programming environment, the Processing Development Environment (PDE). The board of the Processing Foundation is Ben Fry, Casey Reas, and Dan Shiffman.

To succeed, the Foundation needs to raise money to support future versions of the Processing software and related initiatives. The Processing team, a small group of volunteers have released over 200 versions of the software since 2001, leading to the 2.0 release in Spring 2013. With almost no funding between the 1.0 and 2.0 releases, the software was written slowly while the developers managed many other responsibilities and full-time work. The 2.0 software release happened in an unsustainable way, at tremendous personal expense to the lead developers. The Foundation must succeed in raising funds for the initiative to continue.

The initial goal is to hire one full-time developer to maintain and build the Processing code base, while the current Processing team continues to volunteer time to the project.

With the 2.0 release, we're now asking for donations from individuals who use the software and we're actively seeking larger donations from individuals, companies, and other non-profit organizations.

Patrons

(Future list of Processing donations.)

Prior to incorporating as a Foundation, Processing received key funding and support from a few of organizations and companies. This commitment enabled a series of key improvements to the software. We hope to initiate more relationships in the future. The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University sponsored a Processing 2.0 development workshop in Summer 2011. The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University funded The Oxford Project, a series of Processing development workshops during the 2008-2009 academic year. These four-day meetings in Oxford, Ohio enabled the November 2008 launch of Processing 1.0 and stimulated future development. Oblong Industries funded Ben Fry to develop Processing during summer 2008. This funding provided the means to complete the 1.0 release in November 2008. Ben Fry received a 2006 Media Arts Fellowship, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. This grant was the first time Ben was able to work on Processing as a funded project. This led to further developments of the OpenGL and PDF rendering engines, as well as significant enhancements to other libraries and their integration. In summer 2003, The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea funded four individuals to work on Processing. This resulted in Dan Mosedale's preprocessor using Antlr, Sami Arola's contributions to the graphics engine and other contribution to the Processing Development Environment and 2D graphics engine. We are grateful to Gillian Crampton Smith for her encouragement.