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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts by Karen Sandler
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)!
Thoughts on the IRS Review of Free Software Nonprofits and Why I'm Not Worried for Conservancy
by on July 2, 2014
At the Texas Linux Fest three weeks ago I gave a keynote called “Identity Crisis: Are we who we say we are?”. I talked about the different ways people contribute to free and open source software. I discussed how confusing it can be to understand where the for-profit interests in the software and the nonprofit ideological movement begin and end. The details of my talk were covered on LWN last week. Most importantly, we in this community all face conflicts that can impact the decisions we make and how we are perceived by others. In my talk, I specifically mentioned the IRS, because I sympathize with the difficulty the IRS faces in comprehending what makes a legitimate 501(c)(3) free software public charity. They are new to our complex field. When I was a lawyer at the Software Freedom Law Center I regularly applied for tax exemption for organizations and answered the IRS's questions. I was one of the lawyers who initially worked on Yorba's responses, though I left the work to my capable colleagues when I left to become Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Yorba was recently denied tax exempt status, and you can read Jim Nelson's well written post with his reaction to the news.
One point that the IRS examiners all made very clear to me on multiple occasions was that these determinations had no bearing on any existing organizations. This was a question I asked frequently as I was quite troubled by the strange questions they asked and the delays that they were introducing. As a lawyer, I can't give legal advice in a blogpost. I won't opine on what Yorba's letter means for other organizations. But I can take a step back from the rejection and worry less about existing exempt organizations knowing that the rejection does not directly impact us. While the IRS may change its rules with respect to existing nonprofits, the rejection of another organization does not impact them. And a different IRS examiner may have come to a different decision when looking at those facts.
When joining Conservancy a few months back, I looked at our tax exemption application again (the Form 1023 — which I was the primary author of all of those years ago!) and, in particular, the part that described what we intend to do. I was relieved to be reminded that we really described what we do and how we do it accurately. And that the way that we conduct our activities is true to our charitable mission.
I think it can be hard to sort out the corporate interests from the passionate work to make the work better through software freedom. A lot of for-profit companies and trade associations talk a great game about social good. Of course, for-profit companies are committed to shareholder value, and trade associations are required to prioritize a common business interest. Which is why Conservancy as a public charity has an Evaluation Committee that reviews in detail all applications we receive and a staff that oversees the way resources are used, monitoring for corporate control. We have a Conflict of Interest Policy that not only applies to our directors but also to all of our Project Leadership Committees.
We hope that projects that are genuinely working to improve society through free software think about applying to join us. As our Form 1023 says it, you:
must be exclusively devoted to the development of Open Source and Free Software, and that the project must operate in accordance with the with the Conservancy's tax exempt purposes. When projects request admission to the Conservancy, an extensive diligence review is conducted by a committee devoted to this purpose.
Conservancy was founded to be a home for nonprofit free software projects so that they don't have to have lengthy discussion with the IRS, file a lot of paperwork, or take care of a lot of nonprofit corporate minutia, at least not alone. We designed our structure and oversight processes to address many of the worries articulated by the IRS about free software organizations.
It's been nerve racking to watch IRS applications stack up — some have made it through recently and some have not. But I think that if we as a broad community understand our conflicts better (not to mention how a trade association is different from a charity) we'll do a much better job at explaining ourselves to others. If you missed my Texas Linux Fest keynote, please attend my talk at OSCON 2014 later this month, on a similar topic. I'll be sure to leave extra time in the Q&A so we can discuss some of these issues.
