Projects/Open Offsets

= Project Name =

Purpose
Creating an 'Open Offsets' fund to support 'open' (source/knowledge) projects.


 * http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2006-July/000104.html
 * http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2007-October/000621.html

More recent work on this by Soeren Auer:


 * http://www.cofundos.org/ (2007)
 * http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2007-October/000618.html
 * Open Participatory Research (2008): http://wiki.cofundos.org/
 * http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2008-July/000952.html

Original Email
The idea is to set up two funds:

Fund 1: Generic F/OSS Fund
Summary: Donates money to F/OSS projects that produce software we use.

Amount: 500 EUR / year

Motivation: Here at the OKF we use lots of F/OSS for the work we do. However while we do occasionally give back in the form of submitting bugs and contributing code as well as producing our own open source software it would be nice to explicitly recognize the contribution of F/OSS software by donating money to particular projects.

Fund 2: Open Knowledge Projects Fund
Summary: supports external open knowledge projects.

The focus would be on projects actually producing open knowledge or associated tools rather than campaigning organizations.

Amount: 5000 EUR / year

Motivation: while we are doing plenty of open knowledge work in house it is part of the OKF approach that open knowledge development will become more like software development in having a large diversity of projects and packages (with some mechanism for plugging different packages together). Supporting the development of external packages and tools would be a great way to encourage this approach, seed a wider OK community and raise the profile of the OKF.

Administration
Funds would be administered by the OKF. Open discussion of their allocation would take place on the list. Decision making would be by consensus with fallback to a vote ASF style of the combined executive and advisory boards. In the long run we might want to appoint a specific committee that would deal with this.

Regarding application and disbursement I would prefer to have a model that involved **very low** transaction costs. There should be no complex application process (perhaps no application process at all -- or at most just a wiki page), decisions need not be justified etc.

Provision of Funds
Funds would be provided by the OKF. Currently we have sufficient funds to cover at least this year and next in addition to our other commitments.

Extensions
A tentative hope of mine is that these funds might over time develop into 'general' funds to which many people contribute. This would of course necessitate a concomitant widening of the governance (this would be an interesting issue to discuss further ...)

I've long meant to make contributions on a personal basis to various F/OSS projects whose software I've used. However whenever I've thought of doing this I've ended up debating issues such as how much to give and whom to give it too rather than actually giving the money. I would much prefer to be able to set up a standing order to donate annually to some fund and which would then take care of the administration and disbursement.

Similarly if I am an organization -- be it or a government, corporation, NGO etc -- it would be useful to have a central organization through which to disburse funds to F/OSS and OK projects and which would provide 'features' such as: * Accountability and auditing (the money isn't being siphoned off ...) * Allocation decisions * Credibility with the community * Certification of the support (i.e. that the money has been given)

Participate

 * Via email: join the okfn-discuss list or email info [at] okfn [dot] org.

More Details
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