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Compliance Feedback Sessions in 2017

by Karen Sandler on January 13, 2017

While we continue our principled defense of copyleft software on behalf of developers who ask us to do it, Conservancy is committed to examining whether we’re doing things the best we we can. As we publicly promised, we’ve been running feedback sessions on GPL compliance to hear from everyone who is interested in our work.

Bradley conducted a session at Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Brett and I ran one at Linux Plumbers Conference. Both were informative and, honestly, reassuring. While there are some areas we can improve (as a free software organization, we know we can always improve!), our fundamental approach is sound and seems to be in line with what developers and other stakeholders would like us to be doing. Of course, we also have received some mixed messages. Some people strongly criticize us for not being aggressive enough, while others think our rhetoric is a little too strident. What’s been great is to have everything on the table and get people involved. As a public charity, we want to be sure that we are in fact acting in the public’s interest in everything we do.

We’ve got another feedback session scheduled next week at the Linux Kernel Miniconf at linux.conf.au on Monday afternoon. If you’re there I hope you’ll join us. I’ll also be facilitating a fishbowl discussion on GPL compliance at the Legal & Policy Miniconf Tuesday morning. Please let us know if you have any other suggestions for where we should hold more feedback sessions. We’ve been trying to strategically propose these sessions where they’ll be the most effective (we did propose a feedback session with an eye towards getting key corporate leadership feedback at the upcoming Open Source Leadership Summit, but the session was unfortunately not accepted). Other conferences we’ll be at this year include FOSDEM, Campus Party Brasil, SCaLE, LibrePlanet and OSCON. We’ll have a booth at most of these, so even if we don’t have a session please just stop by our booth and tell us what you think!

Lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are only days left for us to earn our generous match from Private Internet Access. We’ve made great progress, but we’re only about 70% there! Please sign up as a Supporter - you’ll be donating to the support of our many member projects, copyleft defense, diversity work via Outreachy as well as the overall promotion and advocacy of free software. There’s still time for your donation to be amplified, but only if you sign up now!

Tags: conservancy, GPL, conferences

Conferences, Standards, and Sponsorships: Selenium’s Work in 2016

by Molly deBlanc on January 12, 2017

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.

Selenium logo

SeleniumConf UK wrapped up November 16th! For three days, Selenium developers and enthusiasts got together to share ideas, work together, and spend time with other community members in London. This year, there were three amazing keynotes, a diverse group of twenty-six speakers, and four full day workshops. Talks are already posted online, and you can watch them on the SeleniumConf UK YouTube channel.

Selenium is a freely-licensed browser automation tool. While it’s most frequently used for testing purposes, it has capabilities beyond that. These include scaling and distributing scripts across environments and reproducing bugs. It’s currently functional in eleven languages, including C#, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. All the major browsers ship with support for Selenium out of the box now, too.

Selenium has been a Conservancy project since 2010. Starting in 2011, Conservancy began to support Selenium’s efforts to host their own conferences, which have grown over the years to the successful events we know today. As a tool, Selenium has become an industry standard, with users ranging from individuals plugging away at their own projects to some of the largest companies in tech.

Selenium demonstrates a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility, and the project leadership looks to sustain Selenium beyond individual donations. In order to help power the project, the team promotes and manages large corporate sponsorships.

Earlier this year, Selenium 3.0 was released, replacing the original Selenium Core—Jason Huggins started developing the Core in 2004—with one based on Selenium WebDriver. Much like Selenium itself, WebDriver is becoming a standard in its own right. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a draft specification for browser automation based on Selenium WebDriver, and members of the Selenium project are on the team to make this an official recommendation.

Interested in getting involved with Selenium? There are lots of ways to contribute to the project—check out the documentation for details! You can also help them along by donating to Selenium.

Tags: conservancy, Year In Review 2016, Member Projects, Selenium

Helping Our Member Projects Raise Money

by Tony Sebro 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.

A photograph of Walter Bender helping children at Turtle Art Day

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!

Tags: conservancy, Member Projects

LibreHealth’s Michael Downey on Why He’s a Conservancy Supporter

by Brett Smith 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.

Tags: conservancy, supporter, Member Projects

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