(I’m telling the whole story here simply to get everyone up to speed — I often forget that I see more of this story than others so I want to share completely)
Update: FLOSS == Free/Libre/Open Source Software
During OSCON 2005, I had a chance to meet with some folks involved with the Drupal project. At the time, the group was trying to figure out a way to fund some improvements in their infrastructure as well as how to take in money from the Google Summer of Code program. The problem was that Drupal was not a non-profit and could not act as its own fiscal agent. The OSL helped out where we could by taking the donations they received for equipment and putting them towards that but the Google funds were much more complicated.
Just a few days before that, I had attended the FLOSS Foundation summit. This was organized by Alison Randal (of Perl and O’Reilly fame) and was a chance for the project leads for several FLOSS projects to gather and talk about some of the mechanics of managing and growing their communities. There were people there from the very mature (Eclipse) to the just-getting-started (Dojo Foundation). What struck me as interesting is that each project had their own path but each one struggled to get there.
Here at the OSL we have a pretty unique view into lots of different projects. Our focus is on helping projects with hosting and development. More importantly, we help projects focus on their “main thing”. This rarely ever involves hosting or scaling of infrastructure or getting bits to end users. These are boring, but essential, components to open source projects. Talking with Drupal and the attendees at the FLOSS summit it occurred to me that it would fantastic if there was something that could managing the “hosting” of the administrative side of the house for these projects.
Around about this time (or shortly thereafter), Chris Messina and I had started a dialog on the above. We had both seen what was happening and we came up with the idea of a “Web 2.0 Foundation”. We quickly found this had some limitations (the biggest IMHO was WTF do we do when Web 3.0 comes out?!). The conversation then led to what if we had a FLOSS Foundation that could do some simple things for projects to help them get to where they are going quicker? Again, every project has its own path, and this isn’t about incubating the projects but more providing some services and leveraging some social networks to help these communities get-to-where-they-are-going.
On January 10th, 2006, Chris, myself, Jason, Raven, Phil and Tara all gathered at the OSAF to talk about how to make the above happen. In our discussions, we couldn’t quite figure out a place to start and after several hours in front of a white board we were all pretty wiped out. (Fortunately MacWorld was going on so everybody was in high spirits with the uber cool new Macs … ha!) Leading up to this discussion, both Chris and I had talked with Raven at length about the need for some type of organization like this.
I was a little set back by the talks at the OSAF and was even starting to question the need for yet-another-organization. That is until I got a phone call from one of the projects we host who asked if we could act as a fiscal agent for them. You see, they had not received their non-profit status from the IRS (this can take up to six months). Here at the OSL and as a part of Oregon State University we can’t really do something like that so I had to tell them we could not help. However, it sparked my interest once again in this concept.
We’re now up to last week. Pat Mochel and I are on the technical board of advisors for LinuxFund and we had planned to get together at the OSDL to brainstorm on some ideas for LinuxFund (and so I could get him up to speed on the above). Bear in mind that Pat and I have no direct bearing on governance at LinuxFund other than we know the Executive Director and a few of the board members. Other than that, we just give our thoughts. In talking with Pat, he and I hashed over some general ideas of what this FLOSS organization would look like. It should be pretty lean and mean; farm out what you can and keep a minimal staff. Leverage the community and the eco-system to hire things like FLOSS-friendly accountants and legal help. I love pro-bono but nothing gets things done like cold, hard cash.
An hour of conversation and some time in front of a white board yielded this “org chart”:
Mind you this is a first run and one that actually has a bunch of my doodles on it (that reminds me … I need to call David Pool). It’s also full of fits and starts about who should actually be the umbrella (if you look closely there is an “OSL?” in there which we quickly determined would not make sense due to our organizational structure at the University here).
Alright, so what is this thing anyways? Start with something simple like a “fiscal agent” and do that for the open source community. This would be in the same vein as what the Tides Foundation does for traditional non-profits (traditional being anything that doesn’t involve software I guess). You don’t have to do it permanently, just help these specific communities get to where they are going. If they want to stay under the umbrella, great, we can do that too. If not? Fantastic! Go forth and do good things. Spin out as a non-profit, etc. The goal of this umbrella org would be to enable these communities and keep them focused on their main thing.
As part of the fiscal agent, you manage accounts for these projects. Let’s say the project does something through fundable.org and then wants to spend the money on servers to be hosted somewhere. Great. Let’s make sure we have some accounts payable people that can do the work of paying the tab and let the project do pick out what they need from some website. We do this at the OSL to a lessor extent already; we help projects choose the infra and they go off and buy it. Yes, I’m being mildly self-serving here because the OSL would like to be a close partner to the as-yet-defined organization.
Also, it should be noted that I randomly picked out projects for the left hand side of that thing. I have no illusions that the Apache Software Foundation would want to use something like this; its simply a frame of reference. I do know that Drupal and the Participatory Culture Foundation could both use a fiscal agent.
I think the problem I was having before this was trying to design the “uber” org all in one go. Looking back at the OSL, we started by simply addressing some needs for open source projects that were unmet. From there, we found our main thing. If we had sat around a table for months we wouldn’t have designed the OSL as it is today. When it comes to open source and their communities, you can’t “design” you have to feel your way through. Execute, learn and repeat.
With all of that said, where do we go from here? Well, I’ll be at RecentChangesCamp.org this weekend and would love to discuss this with other folks. As the OSL, we’d like to help with this in any way that we can. It’s obvious to me that there is a need; now we’re in search of the people to make it happen.