Conservancy Activity Summary, 2010-10-01 to 2010-12-31

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/01/02/conservancy-1.html

[ Crossposted
from Conservancy’s
blog
. ]

I had hoped to blog more regularly about my work at Conservancy, and
hopefully I’ll do better in the coming year. But now seems a good time
to summarize what has happened with Conservancy since I started my
full-time volunteer stint as Executive Director from 2010-10-01 until
2010-12-31.

New Members

We excitedly announced in the last few months two new Conservancy
member
projects, PyPy
and Git.
Thinking of PyPy connects me back to my roots in Computer Science: in
graduate school, I focused on research about programming language
infrastructure and, in particular, virtual machines and language
runtimes. PyPy is a project that connects Conservancy to lots of
exciting programming language research work of that nature, and I’m glad
they’ve joined.

For its part, Git rounds out a group of three DVCS projects that are
now Conservancy members; Conservancy is now the home of Darcs, Git, and
Mercurial. Amusingly, when I reminded the Git developers when they
applied that their “competition” were members, the Git
developers told me that they were inspired to apply because these other
DVCS’ had been happy in Conservancy. That’s a reminder that the
software freedom community remains a place where projects — even
that might seem on the surface as competitors — seek to get along
and work together whenever possible. I’m glad Conservancy now hosts all
these projects together.

Meanwhile, I remain in active discussions with five projects that have
been offered membership in Conservancy. As I always tell new projects,
joining Conservancy is a big step for a project, so it often takes time
for communities to discuss the details of Conservancy’s Fiscal
Sponsorship Agreement. It may be some time before these five projects
join, and perhaps they’ll ultimately decide not to join. However, I’ll
continue to help them make the right decision for their project, even if
joining a different fiscal sponsor (or not joining one at all) is the
ultimately right choice.

Also, about once every two weeks, another inquiry about joining
Conservancy comes in. We won’t be able to accept all the projects that
are interested, but hopefully many can become members of
Conservancy.

Annual Filings

In the late fall, I finished up Conservancy’s 2010 filings. Annual
filings for a non-profit can be an administrative rat-hole at times, but
the level of transparency they create for an organization makes them worth
it.
Conservancy’s FY
2009 Federal Form 990

and FY
2009 New York CHAR-500
are up
on Conservancy’s filing
page
. I always make the filings available on our own website; I wish
other non-profits would do this. It’s so annoying to have to go to a
third-party source to grab these documents. (Although New York State, to
its credit, makes all
the NY
NPO filings available on its website
.)

Conservancy filed a Form 990-EZ in FY 2009. If you take a look, I’d
encourage you to direct the most attention to Part III (which is on the
top of page 2) to see most of Conservancy’s program activities between
2008-03-01 to 2009-02-28.

In FY 2010, Conservancy will move from the New York State requirement
of “limited financial review” to “full audit“
(see page 4 of the CHAR-500 for the level requirements). Conservancy
had so little funds in FY 2007 that it wasn’t required to file a Form 990 at all.
Now, just three years later, there is enough revenue to warrant a full
audit. However, I’ve already begun preparing myself for all the
administrative work that will entail.

Project Growth and Funding

Those increases in revenue are related to growth in many of
Conservancy’s projects. 2010 marked the beginning of the first
full-time funding of a developer by Conservancy. Specifically, since
June, Matt
Mackall has been funded through directed donations to Conservancy to
work full-time on Mercurial
.
Matt blogs once a month (under
topic of Mercurial Fellowship Update)
about his work,
but, more directly,
the hundreds
of changesets that Matt’s committed really show
the advantages of
funding projects through Conservancy.

Conservancy is also collecting donations and managing funding for
various part-time development initiatives by many developers.
Developers of jQuery, Sugar Labs, and Twisted have all recently received
regular development funding through Conservancy. An important part of
my job is making sure these developers receive funding and report the
work clearly and fully to the community of donors (and the general
public) that fund this work.

But, as usual with Conservancy, it’s handling of the “many little
things” for projects that make a big difference and sometimes
takes the most time. In late 2010, Conservancy handled funding for Code
Sprints and conferences for
the Mercurial, Darcs,
and jQuery. In addition, jQuery
held a conference in
Boston in October
, for which Conservancy handled all the financial
details. I was fortunate to be able to attend the conference and meet
many of the jQuery developers in person for the first time. Wine also
held their annual conference in November 2010, and Conservancy handled
the venue details and reimbursements to many of travelers to the
conference.

Also, as always, Conservancy project contributors regularly attend
other conferences related to their projects. At least a few times a
month, Conservancy reimburses developers for travel to speak and attend
important conferences related to their projects.

Google Summer of Code

Since its inception, Google’s Summer of Code (SoC) program has been one
of the most important philanthropy programs for Open Source and Free
Software projects. In 2010, eight Conservancy projects (and 5% of the
entire SoC program) participated in SoC. The SoC program funds college
students for the summer to contribute to the projects, and an
experienced contributor to project mentors each student. A $500 stipend
is paid to the non-profit organization of the project for each project
contributor who mentors a student.

Furthermore, there’s an annual conference, in October, of all the
mentors, with travel funded by Google. This is a really valuable
conference, since it’s one of the few places where very disparate Free
Software projects that usually wouldn’t interact can meet up in one
place. I attended this year’s Soc Mentor Summit and hope to attend
again next year.

I’m really going to be urging all Conservancy’s projects to take
advantage of the SoC program in 2011. The level of funding given out by
Google for this program is higher than any other open-application
funding program for
FLOSS.
While Google’s selfish motives are clear (the program presumably helps
them recruit young programmers to hire), the benefit to Free Software
community of the program can nevertheless not be ignored.

GPL Enforcement

GPL Enforcement,
primarily for our BusyBox member
project, remains an active focus of Conservancy. Work regarding the
lawsuit continues. It’s been more than a year since Conservancy filed a
lawsuit against fourteen defendants who manufacture embedded devices
that included BusyBox without source nor an offer for source. Some of
those have come into compliance with the GPL and settled, but a number
remain and are out of compliance; our litigation efforts continue.
Usually, our lawyers encourage us not to comment on ongoing litigation,
but we did put up
a news
item in August when the Court granted Conservancy a default judgment
against one of the defendants, Westinghouse
.

Meanwhile, in the coming year, Conservancy hopes to expand efforts to
enforce the GPL. New violation reports on BusyBox arrive almost daily
that need attention.

More Frequent Blogging

As noted at the start of this post, my hope is to update Conservancy’s
blog more regularly with information about our activities.

This blog post was covered on
LWN
and
on lxnews.org.