funding-scout

Weekly scan of ~16 funding-body websites (Vinnova, Formas, VR, Trafikverket, K2, RJ, STINT, VREF, FIA Foundation, EU F&T Portal, COST, MSCA, ERC, TRB — see sources.yaml) for opportunities relevant to transport safety, cycling safety, active mobility and motonormativity research. Writes one Markdown file into your Silverbullet space, in the same format every week.

How it works (and its limits)

There's no funding-search API key in this setup, so the script scrapes public listing pages directly: it fetches each page (with a headless Chromium via Playwright, since several of these sites are JS-rendered single-page apps), pulls out every link plus its surrounding text, and keeps anything matching a keyword list (transport, cycling, traffic safety, mobility, motonormativity, etc. — see KEYWORDS in funding_scout.py). It then tries to extract a deadline and an amount from the surrounding text with regex + date parsing.

This is a best-effort heuristic, not a real integration. It will:

• occasionally mis-parse or miss a deadline (flagged with ⚠️ in the report)
• occasionally miss a call entirely if a site's HTML changes
• occasionally include a false positive

Treat the weekly file as a first pass to skim, not a source of truth — always open the linked call page before acting on a date or amount. Expect to spend 10–15 minutes every couple of months tuning KEYWORDS/TYPE_RULES in funding_scout.py or fixing a URL in sources.yaml when a source goes quiet.

Files

File	Purpose
funding_scout.py	The scraper + Markdown renderer
sources.yaml	List of sites to scan — edit freely
requirements.txt	Python deps
Containerfile	Builds the image (Playwright + Chromium included)
funding-scout.container	Podman Quadlet unit (the "service")
funding-scout.timer	Plain systemd timer that runs it weekly

One-time setup

1. Find your Silverbullet volume name.

podman volume ls

2. Build the image.

cd funding-scout/
podman build -t funding-scout:latest -f Containerfile .

3. Edit funding-scout.container: replace <SILVERBULLET_VOLUME> with the volume name from step 1. Adjust the OUTPUT_PATH subfolder (/output/spaces/jakub/funding/funding-radar.md) if you'd rather it land somewhere else in your space.

4. Install the Quadlet + timer. For a rootless setup (most common for a home server):

cp funding-scout.container /etc/containers/systemd/
cp funding-scout.timer     /etc/systemd/system/

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable --now funding-scout.timer

5. Test it manually before waiting a week:

systemctl start funding-scout.service
journalctl -u funding-scout.service -f

Need to restart silverbullet.services. Then check your Silverbullet space for spaces/jakub/funding/funding-radar.md afterwards.

Rebuilding after edits

Any time you change funding_scout.py or sources.yaml:

podman build -t funding-scout:latest -f Containerfile .
systemctl start funding-scout.service

No need to touch the Quadlet or timer files for a code change — only if you rename things or change the output path.