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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts tagged supporter
April 3rd last chance to donate towards Compliance Match
by on April 2, 2015
Tomorrow is the last day to contribute towards Conservancy's $50,000 anonymous match! We've made great progress and are tantalizingly close to making the full goal. We're now 97.8% of the way there. You can help us close the gap — just 11 Supporter sign ups will do it!
If you want more details about the suit that Christoph Hellwig is bringing against VMware in Germany, you can read our FAQ or watch the video below of my keynote at LibrePlanet on the topic.
Supporter Video: Jono Bacon
by on January 30, 2015
Check out this video of Jono Bacon, Senior Director of Community at the XPrize Foundation and former Ubuntu Community Manager at Canonical, talking about Conservancy and why he is a Supporter. "We need to protect the current generation of free and open source projects and also pave the way to a brighter future," explains Jono in the video.Many thanks to Jono for supporting sofware freedom and our organization! Join Jono and become a supporter of Conservancy today.
Also thanks to Bastian Ilsø for helping us to put this together and to Javier Suarez (jahzzar) for freely licensing his song, "I need", under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0), which we used in the video.
If you are at FOSDEM today, sign up as a Supporter and come to our dinner tonight for free. If you aren't yet ready to sign up as an official Supporter, tickets are still available at the door.Happy New Year from Conservancy and Video from Mike Linksvayer
by on December 31, 2014
As we wrap up 2014 we are grateful for all of the fantastic participation from our hundreds of volunteers across our many member projects.
The best thing about launching our Supporter program is the all of the positive feedback we've gotten. We are realizing that we need to draw attention to all of the work we and our projects are doing and invite you to help us do that!
Along these lines, we're pleased to publish this video from Mike Linksvayer. Mike is on Conservancy's board of directors and is a member of our evaluation committee. You can watch the video to hear why he volunteers his time with Conservancy and why he has also chosen to become a Conservancy Supporter.
Many thanks to Bastian Ilsø for helping us to put this together and to Javier Suarez (jahzzar) for freely licensing his song, "I need", under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0), which we used in the video.
We're getting excited about all of the things we have in the works for 2015! Please become a Conservancy Supporter to help us continue our mission. Have a great holiday and all the best in 2015.
Thinking about the Importance of a Membership Program
by on December 24, 2014
As anyone who's been following Conservancy's news knows, we've been working with the rest of Conservancy's staff on launching and promoting a Supporter Program, a way for individuals to support Conservancy though membership fees (we're avoiding the term "member" because Conservancy's members are our member projects).
We launched this program for a number of reasons. Part of this, of course, is financial. While we do receive a portion of the revenue donated to our projects, we keep that number low enough that it doesn't even pay for a single staff member. We need to raise money in order to be able to keep the full support of our projects that we have in place now. I sometimes refer to our model as "fiscal sponsorship plus" because we do a lot more for our projects than many of the other organizations in free and open source software (by design - it's useful to have different orgs doing different things!). But that level of support requires significant resources and we don't want to pass that burden onto our member projects if we can possibly help it.
We do fundraise from companies (and if you think your company can sponsor Conservancy please get in touch!) but there can be trade offs with this as an overall model. Bradley wrote an excellent blogpost about this already. Because we are focused on what's good for the community and not necessarily what's good for companies (though our interests are often aligned), we need a strong membership base to help balance things out. Trade associations have a much easier time fundraising from companies for these reasons but we as a community get so much more out of a public facing org.
We also realized that we've really been focused on promoting our projects and not necessarily Conservancy as a whole. While everyone has heard of Git, Samba, Wine, and Inkscape (the list goes on, it's very hard to chose projects to single out when they're all so great) I think a lot of people don't even know that we exist or what we do. By launching this program, we have a lot more excuses to tell people about our activities and why we matter. I had a great time writing our fundraising page, and distilling this into a short explanation.
That said a lot of people *do* already know about Conservancy and why it's an important organization. I've been so excited at the sign ups we've had for Conservancy's Supporter program so far and I realized something today that floored me - the list of Supporters to date is in large part comprised of experts in the field. I was looking at the list of Supporter names and it read like something of a "who's who". We could make a killer conference if we gathered those people to speak! It gave me confidence in our program and in our organization generally. If these people who I deeply respect think that Conservancy is worth contributing to, then we must be on to something good. I expect it will take us years to build up the membership base we want but it's fitting to have so many leaders signing up and publicly acknowledging us. I'm hoping we will be able to grow the program a lot in the near future and we've got a lot of exciting stuff we're working on that I can't wait to talk about.
I hope you have a great holiday season! Please consider joining the ranks of Conservancy Supporters and generally supporting the charitable organizations in free software (specific props to GNOME and the FSF)!
