During the preparations and discussions at SugarCamp Paris, it became obvious that money is going to play a more significant role in Sugar Labs in the future. If Sugar Labs does not handle cash directly, we will certainly have friends and partners who do.
How to raise money? How spend money? How to use the money to strengthen rather than fracture the community that we have been build for the last twelve months. The most important point is to realize the the 'role' money plays in Sugar Labs. In a For-Profit business, the goal, or mission, of the organization is to make money. The board of directors has a legal responsibility to shareholders to make money. The business units; manufacturing, research and development, sales, marketing all exist to support goal of making money. Sugar Labs, on the other hand, has the missions of creating the Sugar Learning Platform and developing the Sugar ecosystem. Every team exists to support those goals. The Sugar Labs Oversight board, elected by the Sugar Labs members, has the legal and moral obligation of supporting the Sugar Labs missions. There are a couple of steps which successful open source projects have used to make this work. 1. Separate project and platform decisions. 2. Establish consistent and transparent relationships. 3. Create value in the ecosystem to support development and support. 4. Learn from mistakes and move on. Separate project and platform decisions. For example the Mozilla project is composed of two different organizations; Mozilla.org and Mozilla Corp. Mozilla.org is the community based organization which retains control of the technical decision and direction on the Firefox platforms. Mozilla.org licenses the Mozilla trademarks to Mozilla corp to _support_ the development project. If, at any time, Mozilla.org decides that Mozilla Corp is not acting in the best interest of the org, they can cancel the licensing agreements. Gnome goes even further. The Gnome foundation is specifically restricted from making technical decisions which affect the direction of the platform. While it is too early in the Sugar Labs life cycle to start forming additional organizational layers. We can follow the example of the Apache foundation and simply make it clear that financial decisions are separate from technical or educational decisions. A cautionary tale can be seen in Open Office. A disproportionally large percent of both the project and technical leaderships comes from Sun. As a result, technical decisions are based on internal Sun politics rather than technical validity. Establish consistent and transparent relationships. Sugar Labs must create methods for establishing and fostering relationships in a open and consistent manner. The goal is that Sugar Labs can accept contributions and support from anyone without fear of unspoken agreements or understandings. How the contributions are used and applied is up to the community. This model can work very well. As a informal example, the Apache Foundation is able to accept $100,000 per year from Microsoft without compromising their mission, vision or values. Gnome is slight slightly more formal. Corporate contributors are invited to sit on an advisory board. The advisory board meets regularly with the Executive director. As a result, the donors voices are heard. The eclipse process is similar, yet more formal. Create value in the ecosystem to support development and support. A large part of the value of collaborative platforms is derived from the network effect. The value of the network grows faster than the number of included nodes. No company has created a early childhood learning platform because the risk is not worth the reward for any individual company. By positioning Sugar labs as a point of collaboration for anyone interested in providing a complementary good or service to Sugar, Sugar Labs can reduce the risk carried by any individual organization. Learn from mistakes and move on The final point is too learn from our mistakes and move on. Sugar Labs is going to make mistakes and probably a lot of them. But, by admitting our mistakes, and fixing them, we can generate trust from our partners and users. david _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
