Foundations summit

October 20, 2005 1:59 pm Dave Neary gnome

Tomorrow morning, I will be flying to Amsterdam for the foundations summit – a meeting of representatives of a bunch of free software based non-profits. So far, the Motley Bunch of organisations who will be represented are:

  • GNOME Foundation
  • The Perl Foundation
  • Blender Foundation
  • ObjectWeb
  • Classpath
  • Plone Foundation
  • YAPC Europe
  • OSI
  • Web 2.0 (OK, Chris, you’re not a non-profit, but we love you anyway)
  • Creative Commons International
  • Mozilla Foundation
  • Stichting NLnet
  • Benetech
  • Python Software Foundation
  • KDE e.V.
  • ASF

This is something I’ve been working on for a while now, and we deliberately kept it low-key to build up trust to talk about sensitive and confidential issues, and also to avoid a low SNR early on. But after a good start, and after over 6 months of good communication, the list is a really useful ressource, and word has started to get out – which is great.

We have a wiki, a mailing list with a growing membership, and this will be the second summit of its kind (I wasn’t at the last one).

We plan to talk about stuff which is essential to most non-profits, and which we all suck at mostly – governance, trademarks, legal frameworks, making sure the foundation fits into the community, and doesn’t try to dominate it. And also areas where we can better co-operate – on infrastructure, legal and accounting problems, for example.

Having a network of people in various organisations who are all friends and know what’s going on, and who can help solve each other’s problems, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I also plan to pop in to Bar Camp and see what those guys are up to. It should be lots of fun.

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