I'm not on the foundation, but I know a couple of people who are. If one of them shows up, he or she will have better answers.

• No, and Damian and Dan may or may not receive a grant this year. I don't think it's been decided.
• I don't know. You may need a parent or guardian to sign for you if you receive the grant.
• Yes, most new grants will probably be small ones. There should be a handful of grants announced in the next little bit — perhaps in the next few days, or perhaps at YAPC::NA. In this case, "small" means "less than a few thousand dollars".
• In the past, rather infrequently. In the future, hopefully much more frequently. Some will be awarded soon. I suspect there will be several smaller grants awarded each quarter.

I'm pretty sure there's no age limit as such for the grants, but awarding of grants is based to some extent on the reputation and need of the grantee--while I don't think being underage would forbid granting, it would make it tough to build enough of a reputation (or demonstrate enough need) to warrant awarding the grant. There are a lot of worthy grant requests, and a very limited pool of cash, so things get looked at pretty closely.

is it too late to put in a proposal for this year then? as far as reputation, i'm a friar here (when i'm not anonymous), i have a module on cpan, and i've been leading an open-source perl project for about a year. would any of this be useful in proving my worthiness?

It's certainly not too late. Your perlmonks reputation doesn't mean anything as such--the standard refrain of "XP doesn't matter" is true. :) The project and module will certainly help demonstrate your skills, for better or worse, though there's still the issue of need, both of which, along with the proposed project itself, get weighed against the other applicants.

Hi

A couple points to consider:

• What do you need the money for?
• Is your contribution really so valuable to the Perl community that they should pay you for it?
• You say you have "a module on cpan." Have you looked at how many people also have modules on cpan? Many of these people have made multiple major contributions. What makes your contribution stand out?
• As stated before, even key players like Dan and Damian may not get grants for their excellent work (thanks guys :). That's not even considering these people or the many other most excellent developers who provide you with a free language.

I guess this basically boils down to, why should you be given a grant over others?

While the questions "who the heck are you?" and "have you considered getting over yourself" are always good ones to ask, I wouldn't put too much soul-searching in before putting in a grant request. If you have good reason and can make a good case, put the request in and leave it to the folks awarding the grant to decide whether it's worth funding and, if it is, how it stacks up against the other requests that are worth funding.

Many perfectly good requests will get rejected for lack of funds, and many perfectly ungood requests will get rejected for lack of goodness, but that's how this stuff goes. As long as you expect rejection and your ego can handle it, you're fine.