Aharon Varady, who first outlined the project in 2002, directs the Open Siddur and administers, curates, and provides light-touch editing for all the content on opensiddur.org. Aharon’s work on the Open Siddur Project is financially supported by patrons via patreon and by book sales at Dimus Parrhesia Press.

Efraim Feinstein has been leading development of an Open Siddur application, a web-based app for folk to craft their own siddur from a database of carefully tagged liturgy and liturgy-related work.

We would like to thank the following organizations and individuals for their early help in publicly launching the project.

Daniel Sieradski, for pulling me into his vision for Jew-it-Yourself in 2006, and continuing to support Open Source Judaism after all of these years.
Azriel Fasten, for connecting Efraim and Aharon in late 2008.
J.T. Waldman (Tagged TaNaKh, Jewish Publication Society Special Projects), for working within the Jewish Publication Society to advocate for this vision in 2009, and help fund my summer at PresenTense.
Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz (PresenTense Institute), for helping us to better understand ourselves in 2009.
Bob Goldfarb, for agreeing to the Center for Jewish Culture & Creativity to act as our fiscal sponsored 501(3)c non-profit in accepting tax-deductible donations on our behalf.
Hadar, for financially supporting the Open Siddur as a community project of Aharon Varady in 2009-2010. (A special thanks to Rabbi Jason Rubenstein and Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, for supporting our vision of an Open Content licensed database of divrei torah, sourcesheets, translations, and recordings at Mechon Hadar.)
Harry Aizenstadt and Lisa Rubins (family of Rabbi Jacob Freedman, z”l) for sharing the late Rabbi’s surviving papers in 2009-10.
Dr. Yoram Gnat, z”l, and Maxim Iorsh of the Culmus Project, for their fonts, and also for their support in customizing and fixing several fonts upon request.

We look forward to acknowledging you. Please join our community and contribute to the Open Siddur by transcribing or translating texts, researching, providing art and comments, sharing ideas, or if you have technical skills, helping us build the Open Siddur web application. If you would like to support the Open Siddur Project financially, tax free donations can be made via a donation page sponsored by Jewish Creativity International, a 501(3)c non-profit providing the Open Siddur with fiscal sponsorship.

Supporting Infrastructure

The developers of eXist-db, a native XML database.
The developers of Saxonica, the Saxon processor for XSLT, XQuery, and XML Schema, including the only XSLT 3.0 conformant toolset.
The developers of Text Encoding Initiative, for their XML schema in support of the digital humanities.
The developers of WordPress, the open-source CMS engine driving opensiddur.org

Licensing & Standards Framework

The Open Source Initiative, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Free Culture Foundation for maintaining the definitions of open-source, open, and free (as in freedom).
The Creative Commons for their three free-culture compatible Open Content licenses (CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA).
The Free Software Foundation, for their persistence.
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the Open Document Fellowship for setting standards.
The Wikimedia Foundation and its constellation of Open Content licensed sites (Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc.), for setting a good example.

PresenTense Institute

In the summer of 2009, the Open Siddur was one of sixteen innovative projects chosen for participation in the PresenTense Institute 2009 Summer Workshop for Jewish social entrepreneurship in Jerusalem. Aharon Varady was selected as the Rena and Josh Kopelman Chair of Online Community Organizing, an honor presented by the Kopelman Foundation, and the Open Siddur is grateful for their sponsorship of his work at PresenTense. We deeply appreciate the participation and interest of the PresenTense staff in the public launch of Open Siddur: Ariel Beery, Aharon Horwitz, Brachie Sprung, Shai Davis, and Brian Blumenthal. Their skill building advice, ideas, and ability to connect us with helpful collaborators was extremely useful and made for a productive summer. We would also like to thank the advice and support provided at that time by J.T. Waldman and Avi Warshavsky (Director of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology Department of Humanities). Many thanks to J.T. Waldman, modest travel grants to attend the workshop were provided by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Jewish Publication Society.