[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen foundation (again)

[Hyman, Ben EDUC:EX]

I concur entirely with Dan (thanks for reviving this discussion Dan), and would love to see the community celebrating the creation of just such a Foundation at the conference in Grand Rapids. Perhaps that's being unrealistic, but sooner is better, IMHO. I suppose Foundation establishment should precede celebration...perhaps an exploratory work group could be nominated by the community?

Ben Hyman
Manager, Library Policy & Technology
Public Library Services Branch, Ministry of Education, BC
Phone 250.387.4043 or Toll Free 800.663.7051
ben.hyman at gov.bc.ca <mailto:ben.hyman at gov.bc.ca> 
www.bced.gov.bc.ca/pls/ <http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/pls/> 

From: Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net>

Date: Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 4:22 PM

Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen foundation (again)

To: Evergreen Discussion Group <open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>

There was a brief discussion shortly after the Evergreen Conference about the possibility of setting up an Evergreen Software Foundation [1] and most recently a proposal to set up a joint Koha + Evergreen foundation (which is probably a function better served by something like http://www.code4lib.org/ <http://www.code4lib.org/>  in any case).

I posted a response to George's blog post [2] about the difficulties that the Koha community has undergone recently and their renewed effort to establish a foundation, but in that context I would like to revive the discussion about an Evergreen Software Foundation by suggesting that if such an entity is formed, it should roughly have the following responsibilities:

* Hold the trademarks, logos, and evergreen-ils.org/open-ils.org related collateral in trust for the use of the community

* Extend the community's development capacity (for example, by funding the creation of developer training tutorials and workshops, where development should be defined broadly to include documentation, usability, design, testing, etc)

* Coordinate joint funding for the development of new features

* Organize the Evergreen International Conferences

Further, I suggest that we would be foolish to turn down the Software Freedom Conservancy's [3] offer to serve, for free, as the 501(c)(3) [4] shell organization that would be able to hold the collateral and financial assets in trust for the foundation, and would accept donations to the foundation and maintain corporate records and file the tax return (again, for free). It has been stated several times that "it's not that hard to file the paperwork for a 501(c)(3)", but I would argue that an advantage of the Software Freedom Conservancy is that it is a neutral entity.

[1]. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.education.libraries.open-ils.general/1258 <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.education.libraries.open-ils.general/1258> 

[2]. http://www.parser.ca/z678/2009/09/16/koha-manoeuvres/ <http://www.parser.ca/z678/2009/09/16/koha-manoeuvres/> 

[3]. http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/ <http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/>  - "As a fiscal sponsor for FOSS projects, the Conservancy provides member projects with free financial and administrative services, but does not involve itself with technological and artistic decisions."

[4]. As a Canadian, I don't care about 501(c)(3) status because I get no tax advantages from it.