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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts tagged Member Projects
Helping Our Member Projects Raise Money
by on January 10, 2017
Conservancy member projects depend on contributions from both individual and institutional donors to cover code sprint and conference expenses, pay for hosting services and hardware purchases, and fund strategic software development. Once a project joins Conservancy, Conservancy’s staff takes over the day-to-day responsibility of managing every donation directed to that project. In addition, we sit down with our projects’ leadership committees and help them execute fundraising strategies that go beyond posting a Conservancy-managed PayPal link on the project’s website. Here are some of the common fundraising initiatives Conservancy member projects use:
Grants
Conservancy’s status as a 501(c)(3) public charity enables our member projects to qualify for grants from foundations and other philanthropic donors who want the financial transparency and mission-centric focus public charities are required to have by US law. In 2016, Conservancy enabled member projects Bro, Buildbot, and Godot to receive grants from the Mozilla Foundation’s Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program. Our member projects are using the grant funds to add new features, improve documentation, and add support for critical web standards.
Walter Bender helps teach a child at Turtle Art Day.
Conservancy helped Sugar get a grant to fund the event.
Photo by Nalin Tutiyaphuengprasert Tukta under
CC BY-SA 2.0
We also successfully helped member project Sugar Labs secure a grant from the TripAdvisor Charitable Foundation to fund the translation and internationalization of Sugar for use in locales around the world. Sugar Labs has also used the grant to fund Turtle Art Days — mini-conferences where developers and students meet to discuss and share “Turtle Art”.
Member Project Sponsorships
Several of Conservancy’s member projects — including Outreachy, phpMyAdmin, and Selenium — use sponsorship programs administered by Conservancy to raise money. Outreachy’s sponsorship program provides the funding for people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software to work as interns with participating free and open source software communities and organizations. phpMyAdmin’s sponsorship program helps fund contractors to work on security maintenance, bug fixing, and code base improvement. Selenium’s sponsorship program helps cover project infrastructure costs and developer travel to project-related events; it also provides financial support for Selenium’s official conferences.
Sponsorship programs allow us and our projects to publicly acknowledge the financial support we receive from corporate donors. Corporations who support our member projects appreciate these acknowledgments, and we’ve enjoyed the opportunity to build relationships with repeat donors who gladly renew their sponsorship over the years.
Roadmap Campaigns
Projects often seek to raise money to fund strategic development. A project may want to fund a developer to focus on implementing a new feature, or on solving a particularly difficult problem. In other cases, projects notice that their volunteer contributors have gravitated towards contributing to more glamorous, bleeding edge parts of the code base — meaning the core can use a little more love. Conservancy helps a member project’s leadership committee draft a fundraising proposal describing the tasks they’d like to accomplish, and the budget needed to accomplish those tasks. Projects publish their final proposals in the form of fundraising campaigns.
As an example, PyPy has used this strategy to fund work on multiple long-term tasks that together advance PyPy’s technical roadmap and further Conservancy’s mission.
Conservancy manages the donations generated from these campaigns, and works with our projects to spend the funds in a manner consistent with their campaigns’ stated goals and Conservancy’s nonprofit mandate.
Community-Driven Campaigns
Conservancy member project Inkscape launched a funded development program that will enable any interested community member to organize his or her own campaign to raise funds to complete items on an Inkscape-maintained “jobs list”. Community members can propose their own items to be added to the list. If a campaign organizer is able to raise sufficient funds for a particular item, Inkscape will then use the funds to retain contract software developers to complete the task.
Inkscape’s program is designed to broaden the pool of community members engaged in job list creation and in fundraising. It’s a novel approach for a Conservancy project, and we’re excited to work with Inkscape and see how the user and developer communities respond.
Affiliate Programs and More
Conservancy has helped our member projects raise funds in lots of other ways. We accept donations via eBay’s Giving Works program (which allows eBay sellers to donate portions of their sales proceeds to registered charities), and Amazon’s Associates program (as seen in links on the Git and Twisted project websites) — just to name a few. We work with our projects to identify and vet new fundraising platforms, and we’re willing to consider virtually any strategy that doesn’t run counter to our organizational mission or IRS rules.
Volunteers (and Donors) Wanted
If you’d like to contribute to Conservancy and/or one of our member projects in ways other than by software development, we could always use volunteers to help out with fundraising. Feel free to contact us with any fundraising ideas you may have; we’d be happy to start a dialogue. If you would like to support our member projects financially, visit the member project website of your choice and follow the instructions to donate. Conservancy will process the donation on our project’s behalf.
And, of course, Conservancy needs your help as well. We rely on the public’s donations to provide these and other critical services that help our member projects flourish. So, if you would like to contribute Conservancy — and all of our member projects at once — become a Conservancy Supporter today!
LibreHealth’s Michael Downey on Why He’s a Conservancy Supporter
by on January 2, 2017
Michael Downey is one of the developers at the helm of our newest member project, LibreHealth. He was eager for the project to join Conservancy because, as he put it, the organization is “a really important player taking on responsibilties that are often neglected in our projects.” Join Michael as a Conservancy Supporter now to help us continue to provide these services to more projects.
New CPUs, GPUs, and faster migrations: QEMU looks forward to 2017
by on December 27, 2016
This series covers new developments and exciting projects taken on by Conservancy member projects. To learn more about Conservancy member projects, or the non-profit infrastructure support and services offered by the Conservancy, check out Conservancy’s Projects page. Please support Conservancy so we can continue to help all this important software.
The cloud—the great modern technology buzzword. Even those who don’t think of themselves as technical users have heard the phrase and perhaps even benefited from it. Though there are many proprietary cloud providers, OpenStack is the most popular FLOSS cloud software platform, powering massive web sites like Overstock.com and PayPal. What you might not know is that Conservancy member project QEMU is at the heart of OpenStack, and the project is proud to support them.
QEMU is a FLOSS project that makes it possible to emulate one hardware platform on another hardware platform and/or run multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine. QEMU is just one of the many great FLOSS communities that Conservancy supports and I was lucky enough to be able to interview several of QEMU’s main contributors to ask them about their project, its future, and how Conservancy supporters have helped them succeed! In my interview with Stefan Hajnoczi, one of several QEMU subsystem maintainers and a contributor to the project since 2010, he said that the project benefits from Conservancy’s infrastructure, legal and community support.
An important moment in the life of any FLOSS project is when it adopts a structure that can outlast any single individual. Stefan says that Conservancy has helped QEMU make that trasition. Conservancy provides the infrastructure for holding domain names, hosting the project’s website, handling the project’s finances and accepting tax-free donations.
Conservancy also helps QEMU when the rare legal issue arises. “It’s difficult for any open source project that doesn’t have lots of funds to get legal clarity,” says Mr. Hajnoczi, and QEMU’s many different uses make legal clarity particularly important for the project.
QEMU is a widely used project and accepts contributions from a variety of sources, from corporate developers to hobbyists. Corporate and FLOSS projects of all kinds integrate and modify QEMU because its utility and flexibility make it a great foundation on which to build solutions for their end users’ problems. This means that QEMU is often mixed with software distributed under several different licenses. Because so many end users benefit from QEMU’s integration in these solutions, there are plenty of people who can report potential license violations that QEMU and Conservancy work together to resolve.
Although it’s already an invaluable resource in the corporate world, in other FLOSS communities and for many end users, the QEMU project is not slowing down! 2017 is shaping up to be a very productive year for QEMU and it could not sustain its growth without support for the user and developer community by Conservancy.
In 2017, QEMU will advance their support for the ARM and RISC-V architectures. Full support for these architectures is vital. The heart of almost every mobile phone is an ARM processor, and the chip is even starting to be used in datacenter servers because of its power efficiency. RISC-V is a completely open architecture specification developed by a consortium whose members include Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, IBM, and HP Enterprises, among others. The goal is to develop RISC-V to work in a variety of contexts, from high-performance computing to computer science and engineering education.
In 2017 QEMU also plans improvements in the software’s ability to move running systems between different computers without pausing execution, called live migration. QEMU has supported live migration since 2010 but plans on expanding support for this feature in the new year. This work will make it possible for administrators to immediately shift a VM to another physical machine without having to wait for the VM’s utilization to reach a certain level, a limitation that exists today.
Finally, 2017 will also bring new support for QEMU’s ability to virtualize graphics processing units (GPUs). These days many artificial intelligence and machine learning software tools are being written to take advantage of GPUs. Virtualizing those resources in the way that QEMU already virtualizes a CPU, hard drive or network card would reduce the total amount physical resources required for GPU-intensive applications by sharing the resources efficiently.
These advances are all driven by QEMU’s community of developers and users. Conservancy helps QEMU foster that community by providing hardware and software resources for Internet hosting and facilitating the nuts and bolts of its participation in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. The work from developers mentored through those projects has pushed QEMU into new areas. Conservancy has worked with QEMU to make it as easy as possible for both mentors and mentees to work together productively.
Since its founding in 2004, QEMU has made a huge technical and social impact thanks to its role in facilitating cloud deployments. Its incredible success so far is only overshadowed by its future. Conservancy looks forward to continuing to work with QEMU as it expands and grows in 2017 and beyond.
Chromium's Alice Boxhall Explains Why She Supports Conservancy
by on December 20, 2016
Alice Boxhall helps develop Chromium, with a focus on accessibility features. In this video, she talks about some of her favorite Conservancy member projects and why she supports the organization. Do you want free software to be for everyone too? Support Conservancy today!
