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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts by Deb Nicholson
Nicer Things: Completely Normal and Nice Things People Have Said About Conservancy
by on December 28, 2018
Conservancy makes a choice to be non-creepy, despite the overwhelming piles of spam from non-profit strategists, digital marketing experts and sales pitches for lists of potential donors sourced in creepy ways. If you know us at all, you know we will never choose the upside down path of buying your social media info or paying to ghost you with ads all over the internet just because you've visited a site that lets data collection companies know that you *might* be into free and open source software. Instead, we rely on our existing supporters to sing our praises and recommend our work in a *non-creepy* way, to potential new Conservancy supporters.
"I have been a proud supporter of Conservancy for several years, and am even more excited to be increasing my support in 2018. Among the many crucial projects Conservancy stewards, I am particularly pleased to see the great work they do on behalf of Outreachy and Teaching Open Source. As a donor who cares deeply about my funding having a meaningful social impact, I am very happy to see how well Conservancy stewards its funding and dedicates so much of its time, energy, and money to the success of its member projects."
Leslie Hawthorn, Senior Principal Technical Program Manager, Open Source & Standards Team at Red Hat
"Advocating for freedom from centralized software platforms and surveillance is only part of the struggle, we must also provide a place for community-driven free software alternatives to thrive. I support Conservancy because they provide that home -- while also serving as a strong advocate for a diverse free software movement."
Kade Crockford, Director, Technology for Liberty Program at American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts
Jeremiah Foster, Community Manager of the GENIVI Alliance on why it's so important to have an organization that pays attention to GPL compliance.
"I'm a Conservancy supporter because I support projects like Outreachy. Outreachy helps bring people from under-represented groups into free software, while providing compensation which gives new people the financial stability to engage full-time."
Katie McLaughlin, Director at Python Software Foundation and Conference Director for Pycon Australia
If you like our vision of community-driven, fantastically diverse and always principled free software, then we hope you'll support us by making a financial donation to help us keep doing the work to make that vision a reality.
If you're already a supporter, thank you so much. We really appreciate everything you've already done to help us meet our match.
Elana Hashman: Governance & Federation are the Future
by on December 27, 2018
This is part of our ongoing series on generous matching donors. Elana is the Queen of Debian Clojure, Empress of Symbol Versioning, Conqueress of ABIs, Python Packaging Authority, ELF Herder and the Winner of this year's Award for most odd, but needful volunteer assistance this year (keeping people from eating pizza on top of the Conservancy tablecloth and so, so much more.) Elana and several other outstanding individuals are joining Private Internet Access and a big anonymous donor in offering a total of $90K in matching funds to the Conservancy for our continued work to provide both support for important free software and a clear voice in favor of community-driven licensing and governance practices.
Deb: What's the most exciting thing you've seen recently in free software?
EH: I'm really excited about a bunch of different emerging free social technologies based on the ActivityPub specification that make up the so-called "fediverse." I think Mastodon might be the most popular—it fills a niche similar to Twitter—but there's also Pleroma, which is Mastodon-compatible and a little simpler to deploy, a peer-to-peer replacement for YouTube called PeerTube, and a federated image sharing app you can use instead of Instagram called PixelFed.
Mastodon has demonstrated that when we prioritize user experiences and work together, we can build free software to sustainably run social collectives on independent infrastructure, and even achieve widespread adoption. This is so meaningful to me: the fediverse embodies all of user freedom, consent, autonomy, self-governance, and community in practice. Independent, federated social networks come with the promise of building online social spaces that better reflect the social needs of individuals and their communities in a way that centralized, corporate social media cannot.
Deb: What do you wish people knew about Conservancy, that they might not know?
EH: Many folks have heard of the wonderful projects that all live together under the Conservancy banner, but I'm not sure if many people are familiar with what it takes to become a Conservancy project!
Conservancy members are required to serve the public interest, develop their software in public, and use a FOSS license. They must also be community-run: a Conservancy project should have a community-elected oversight committee or a minimum of three governing members, so a project can't be run by a single developer, and when members are appointed there can't be more than one employed by a particular company. I think it's really cool that all Conservancy member projects must uphold rigorous standards for community governance.
Deb: You work on several well-known free software projects (Debian, Clojure, Python). Do you have any advice for folks who are just starting with free software contributing?
EH: It's funny when you put it that way — I got started in free software barely five years ago, and I'm almost surprised by how much I've contributed since then. One of the big barriers for me was believing I could do it at all. Even though I've been using free software since 2006 or so, I didn't really see a lot of people like me in the community, and having lurked in IRC channels for years I was so afraid of trying to contribute and getting yelled at for messing up something obvious.
In 2013, I decided to attend an open source day at a conference, and met Asheesh Laroia and Carol Willing. They jumped to onboard me with OpenHatch, a project whose mission was to help newcomers get involved in free and open source software. That chance meeting grew into a GSoC internship with OpenHatch the next summer; later, I became a core maintainer of the project until it wound down. Once I had the right skills, it's become harder for me to say no to contributing to new projects than to just contribute! The fear of messing up spectacularly in public is still there, but it doesn't stop me anymore.
Part of OpenHatch's legacy was encouraging projects to identify and publicly label issues that were relatively small (or "bite-sized") and good for beginners. Now, many spiritual successors to OpenHatch exist, including Your First PR and Up For Grabs.
Deb: What do you hope to see Conservancy accomplish in the next five years?
EH: I think Conservancy is increasingly important for the future of sustainable free software. Recently, we've seen the proliferation of a number of new protectionist licenses, as corporations become more concerned about their open source projects being monetized by other corporations that don't contribute back. I think corporate sustainability and community sustainability are different things, and I'm concerned that the idea of "sustainability" is being co-opted by companies that define it as seeing greater financial returns from their open source projects.
Conservancy fights this co-option with a two-pronged strategy: through its software license advocacy, by helping to educate the public on software licenses and by providing license enforcement to member projects to ensure free software remains free; and through its support of member project operations, by enabling the practice of sustainable community free software in providing fiscal sponsorship and administrative services. I think both are very important and I'd love to see Conservancy continue to grow in both areas over the next five years; perhaps it will even accept some fediverse projects as members :)
Deb: Anything else you'd like to add?
EH: If any of this speaks to you, dear reader, then I'd love to encourage you to support Conservancy by making a donation. But if that's not something you're able to do, you can always volunteer with Conservancy or a member project, or help spread the word for this year's fundraiser!
Photo of Elana Hashman, courtesy of Elana Hashman, all rights reserved.VM Brasseur: Freedom isn't Free
by on December 21, 2018
We got to interview the most excellent VM Brasseur, who is a steadfast Conservancy supporter, volunteer and booster. (She also happens to have written a whole book about contributing to free and open source software.) She took a little time to talk with us about why she donates to Conservancy and why you might like to too.
Deb: Tell us about the moment you decided to become a Conservancy supporter.
VMB: Prior to learning about Conservancy's mission, it hadn't really sunk in to me how critical that sort of work was to Free Software and Open Source. At the time, I was just like most other free and open source software participants: I just didn't think about the mundane administrative side of FOSS. After learning about Conservancy it was like someone had turned on a light in a dark room. It was so obvious now. Of course a project would need to think about accounting, copyright, compliance. Of course developers are unlikely to have the skills necessary to handle that sort of thing. Of course they would need help. No one starts a project thinking, "Oh boy! I'll get to write code and work on accounting, legal matters, and event coordination!", after all.
Once that finally sank in for me, supporting Conservancy was a no-brainer, as did getting the word out so more projects could stop stumbling along in the dark trying to handle their own finances or manage their own legal issues. Projects had to know that there were organisations out there that would help.
Deb: What do you wish people knew about free software?
VMB: As with any other freedom, this kind does not come for free. I'm not talking about paying maintainers, though that seems to be what everyone else is fixated on of late. Freedoms are not won through money. Freedoms are won through the time of every free software developer. Unlike money, when time is spent it's gone forever; there's no chance to earn more later. Too many projects rely on the time of too few maintainers, and those maintainers are devoting too large of a slice of their lives to supporting the projects they love.
Contributing money to a project helps pay for infrastructure, interns, and meetups, and is a worthwhile way to support the projects on which you rely. For many projects, however, contributing your time and expertise can be even more valuable. The time you donate not only improves the project, it also returns a bit of time to the maintainers so they can spend more of their time taking care of themselves and their families. Learning how to contribute to a project is therefore the most valuable way to support free software. All sorts of contributions are needed, not just coding. Security audits, marketing, system administration, user interface and graphic design, project and community management… There are so many ways to contribute to free software that don't require writing a single line of code. Conservancy, with its focus on the administrative and legal challenges faced by FOSS projects, is an excellent example of that.
Deb: What would you like to see Conservancy accomplish in the next five years?
VMB: Ya know what I've loved watching over the past few years? The increasing maturity of Conservancy as an organisation. Hiring more people to distribute the workload, adding infrastructure and tooling… It's been great watching Conservancy add all of these things. They've been going through this maturation process in such a considered and deliberate way, thinking through each change to select what will make the best impact for the member projects, rather than making change purely for change sake. I'd like to see Conservancy continue that trend. By doing that they'll be able to continue serving more projects, more efficiently, without losing any quality of that service.
Deb: What's a question you wish we'd asked? Ask yourself that one and then answer it here.
VMB: "What can people do if they want to support Conservancy but can't contribute money?"
That's a great question! I'm glad you asked! ;-)
While, yes, monetary donations will be doubled right now, money isn't the only way to show your support for Conservancy and Free Software. If you can't spare the cash for whatever reason, one very helpful way to support Conservancy is to share it and its fund drive with your networks. If more people know about the great work that Conservancy does behind the scenes to make Free Software and Open Source projects successful, then more people will have the opportunity to donate and support that work. Just one share on your favourite social networks or group chat system could lead to several donations, and every little bit helps.
Conservancy is running its yearly donation drive, and your donation is matched by other generous donors. Please consider donating to Conservancy today!
"Nigel and Percy" by VMB is available under a CC-BY-SA license.Conservancy's Member Projects are Building the Next Generation of the Free Software Movement
by on December 19, 2018
In order for free software to succeed, we must always be bringing new people to free software. In addition to bringing in developers, we need non-coding contributors and learners of all ages for our software to fulfill the promise of our movement. We love helping our member projects as they reach out to non-coding users and learners of all ages.
Conservancy is well-known for our work to support developers which is obviously super important -- there's no free software without well, people writing software. In fact, it's tough to build truly free software without free tools. So tools and code are critically important for software freedom, but I don't believe we can build a successful free software movement without conscientiously bringing in end-users. Many of our member projects focus on building amazing software for end-users, and maybe (while you're fixing computers for family over the holidays?) one of them can help you bring someone into the free software fold.
Several of our projects don't maintain code at all and/or work solely on helping people learn more about free software. MicroBlocks is a new programming language that enables kids and lifelong learners to start building toys or tools right away. Teaching Open Source collects and advises on curricula that helps college students understand open source development and its legal underpinnings. North Bay Python is a community-driven conference serving local Python developers -- including beginners. Outreachy brings people from underrepresented groups into free software via paid internships. The longevity of the free software movement depends on our collective ability to bring in young people and new people so we are proud to support educational efforts.
Two of our newest projects maintain code bases specifically for people who work at non-profits. Non-profit folks love stuff that is free as in cost and while they appreciate free as in freedom -- they also need code that does not need a lot of tinkering to be deployed. Backdrop CMS is a lightweight, easy to deploy Drupal fork specifically designed for small businesses and non-profits. Houdini helps organizations manage every aspect of their fundraising work. Free software is a good mission match for change organizations so it was great to welcome in two projects this year that are working intentionally to serve this sector.
Of course, we believe that software freedom is for everyone and a few Conservancy projects provide tools that can be used by anyone at all. Etherpad is shared note-taking platform that we use nearly every day in our work at Conservancy. Inkscape can be used for serious artists or those just dabbling in design. There are loads of tutorial videos to help new folks get acclimated and productive. Need a band flyer or church program? There's free software for that!
We even have projects at Conservancy that help people who are just beginning to explore free software. Homebrew enables users to install free software on their Apple systems while Wine helps people use a Windows program on a free operating systems. If you don't work at somewhere like the Conservancy, it can be difficult to ditch proprietary software. Projects like Homebrew and Wine help users find ways to use free software where they can and find a way to transition away from the non-free stuff at their own pace.
So wherever you are in your software freedom journey, Conservancy might have a project that can help. We look forward to helping our member projects do even more to bring in new fans, users and supporters of their work in 2019. Help us help them, by donating to Conservancy today! And be sure to let us know if one of our member projects helped you turn a new person into a free software user -- we love those stories.
