Thank you for your quick response. I also appreciate the transparency conservancy has. After looking at the documents I think all of my existing concerns have been addressed. And I look forward to Racket joining conservancy. :D I do have two comments though:
1. Wow. People really get upset at a 10% overhead! I was honestly shocked at how low that was for the kind of work that conservancy does. 2. I'm a little less surprised people get upset about y'all being too verbose, but I can say that I'm really glad that you put it there. So thank you for it. ~Leif Andersen On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 11:21 PM, Karen M. Sandler <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2018-05-08 6:17 pm, Leif Andersen wrote: >> >> Karen, >> >> Before I begin I'd just like to say thanks for the work you and the >> rest of conservancy do. >> I've followed your work since I was in high school and I also >> appreciate what you've done at both the SFLC and gnome foundation. >> Finally, thank you for your work bringing more women to the free >> software community. I know it personally helps me feel more welcome >> here. > > > Thanks, that means a lot to me! >> >> >> Alright, with all of that out of the way... >> >> I am concerned about the policy's use of the word `grant`. Does this >> mean that all (NSF,, etc.) grants related to Racket's development need >> to go through conservancy. Or that we are required to give 10% of the >> grant amount to conservancy? It would be great if we could get that >> stated a bit more explicitly in the actual four corners of the >> document. > > > Good question, and I'm thrilled folks are reading all of this closely! Third > parties could received grants to work on Racket outside of Conservancy and > Conservancy would not have any involvement in that. For example, a grant > could go directly to an academic institution working on something related to > Racket, and a company could enter into an agreement to do work on Racket as > part of a private contract outside of Conservancy too. Anything that was > dedicated to the project itself would be expected to come through > Conservancy. The agreement is simply stated - 10% of all funds that come in > to the project would go to Conservancy. While this amount may seem high, 10% > of our projects' income doesn't cover the work we do by a long shot for our > projects. We take a loss on fiscal sponsorship because we think it's > important and we go and fundraise directly to cover the rest primarily > through our Supporter program. For example, academic institutions > customarily take at least 30% of any grant funding. We recently were in > discussions with an academic institution that takes 68%! Making sure that > funds are spent properly, whether it's reimbursing developer travel, > administering a grant, or undertaking any of our other project activities > takes more work than you would expect! Plus we have to cover all of our > financial reporting, bookkeeping, administrative and general legal costs too > that all of our projects benefit from. > >> Also, while very clear that this is a standard template, it seems like >> we should talk about the actual document (even a draft of the actual >> one), rather than one that says FIXME all over the place. > > > I totally understand. The two substantive FIXME portions of the agreement > are the names of the committee (which Deb provided in her initial email) and > the representation section. For the representation section for Racket, this > will be a simple majority committee of at least 3 where no two members can > be financially related to the same entity at any time. The committee elects > an authorized representative to be the primary interface with Conservancy. > >> Finally, I absolutely appreciate the effort that conservancy makes to >> both support free software and be transparent. But as before, its >> important to get things down in writing. So, does conservancy have a >> constitution or some other charter document that states how it defines >> conservancies goals, which will hopefully help define how conservancy >> goes about its 'best effort'? > > > Yes! Believe it or not, we are often criticized for having too much > information and text on our website :) > > You can take a look at our About page, our descriptions of what we do and, > perhaps most importantly, take a look at our public filings that we've > aggregated on our website. In particular, the 1023 sets forth for the IRS > what we do as an organization. You can also check out our corporate purposes > in our articles of incorporation which are all about promoting and improving > free and open source software. > > If it's not obvious, we really value transparency which is why we have the > policy to post on a project's mailing list before finalizing admission to > Conservancy. We want to make sure that everyone is on the same page and has > a chance to ask questions directly! > >> Anyway, thank you again for your work, it really means a lot to me. >> Hope you have a good day. > > > You too! > > karen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-dev/CAAVaeECdys6qm28h4YhFU93%3DZJPJp-__aYS5gDdCUZjy5J5cpA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
