p5.js underpins an enormous share of the creative coding covered on this site — WebGPU renderers, shader-authoring layers, the default editor millions of beginners learn on — and almost none of that work is funded the way a comparably widely used piece of commercial software would be. Processing Foundation’s new pilot Open Source Software Microgrants Program is a small, structurally different attempt at closing that gap.
Watch: Building Together: Supporting Processing and p5.js (YouTube)
How the program actually works
Rather than a traditional open call, the Microgrants Program is by invitation only: nominations come from the p5.js Shared Responsibility Committee, made up of Processing Foundation staff and community members, who decide by consensus and can nominate contributors on a rolling basis rather than waiting for an annual cycle. Grants are scoped narrowly — around 10 hours of work toward a concrete, specific deliverable, not an open-ended stipend. In this first pilot year, the Foundation is issuing 20 microgrants, with Generative Art Foundation’s support funding 10 of those specifically for active development and documentation work on p5.js 2.0 and beyond.
Why small and nominated, rather than big and open, is the more honest model
Traditional software grants tend to concentrate funding into a handful of larger awards decided through a competitive application process — a model that works reasonably well for a big, standalone project proposal, but poorly for the kind of unglamorous, essential work open source tools actually need most: fixing a specific bug, writing documentation nobody wants to write, finishing a scoped feature a maintainer already knows needs doing. Nomination-based selection also solves a real problem competitive grant applications have: it reaches contributors already doing the work and already known to the community, rather than favoring whoever writes the best grant proposal.
What this signals about sustaining creative-coding tools
p5.js’s 2.1 release alone credited 31 co-authors, which is a healthy sign for a project’s contributor base but also a reminder of how much unpaid labor keeps tools like this moving. A pilot program funding 20 small, specific pieces of that labor isn’t going to fully solve open source sustainability on its own, but it’s a more realistic starting model than a handful of large grants would be — and the Foundation has explicitly framed this as a pilot meant to grow once it learns what actually works.