Conservancy Now Developing Our Corporate Policies in Public via DVCS
by on June 30, 2014
Everything Conservancy does comes back to our charitable mission: to promote, improve, develop, and defend FLOSS. Our member projects are well-known — and rightly so — for developing of some of the best freely-licensed software available today. And, we have a responsibility to match our projects' standard of excellence in all other aspects of the organization. For example, we have prioritized developing a FLOSS application for non-profit accounting, with the goal of developing a first-rate solution that can benefit the entire non-profit community.
As such, when one of our volunteer software developers recommends that we publish our corporate policies in a public repository, we listen. Earlier this month, Conservancy transitioned to developing our corporate policies in public via a distributed version control system (DVCS). Conservancy's conflict of interest policy, document retention policy, travel and expense policy, and whistle-blower policy are now available for inspection in a public Git repository1.
We believe that developing our corporate policies in public via DVCS will have several benefits. For one, we're now working in a format immediately familiar to the software developers who contribute to our member projects. We expect that our policies will get more attention from a wider pool of volunteers, which will result in greater buy-in and fewer misunderstandings about policy interpretation. We also expect to receive more suggestions — in the form of patches or merge requests — that will result in stronger, better-written corporate policies.
We also expect and welcome input from the public at large. Conservancy's policies will be maintained by Conservancy's Board, who will have final say over all changes to our policies; however, we look forward to receiving comments, suggestions, and "bug reports" from anyone interested in non-profit corporate governance — as it relates to FLOSS or in general.
As a publicly-funded charity, Conservancy also has a responsibility to our donors and to the public at large to strive for transparency whenever possible. Now, as an attorney, I've been trained to always prefer keeping my cards close. However, I believe that our donors will appreciate that our policies are available for public inspection, and that we are therefore committed to holding ourselves publicly accountable to the standards we've articulated.
Lastly, we're pleased to announced that all of Conservancy's policies in the repository are now dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons CC0 license. We encourage our fellow charitable organizations to review and adopt some or all of our policies as they see fit.
So, we invite you to visit our corporate policies repository and review our policies. Scrutinize them, critique them, and submit merge requests. Treat it like a FLOSS project, roll up your sleeves, and get involved. We look forward to working with any and all contributors on strengthening the policies that help us pursue our charitable mission.
1Conservancy is the non-profit home for three DVCS projects: Darcs, Mercurial, and Git. We love all of our member projects equally, but we felt that hosting our policies on all three platforms simultaneously would be overkill. We had to pick one.
Please email any comments on this entry to info@sfconservancy.org.
