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<h1> Applying to Join Conservancy as a Member Project</h1>
<p>Part of Conservancy's activity is through its member projects. These
projects become formally part of Conservancy and have a close relationship
with our activity. Most of our projects are purely software projects, but
we also occasionally accept initiatives designed to advance software
freedom, such as Outreachy.</p>
<p>The situation for non-profit homes for FOSS activities has improved
greatly since Conservancy was founded in 2006. In the USA, options now
exist for 501(c)(3), 501(c)(6) and even for-profit fiscal sponsorship, and
there are other options around the globe as well. Prospective member
projects should carefully consider what type of structure is right for
them.</p>
<p>For our part, Conservancy seeks projects that dedicate themselves to the
advancement of software freedom and focus their projects on the rights of
users to copy, share, modify and improve their software. Being a FOSS
project under an OSI-approved and DFSG-free license is mandatory, but not
the only criteria. Given the many options available for fiscal
sponsorship, we are selective and often refer projects to other fiscal
sponsors that are a better fit. Nevertheless, we encourage projects to
that need a non-profit home to apply to many fiscal sponsors.
<p>Conservancy's Evaluation Committee considers applications on a rolling
basis. Conservancy generally has dozens of projects in various stages of
the application process. We do not move rapidly to accept new projects, as
we have found that consideration of joining or forming a non-profit
organization for your project is best done with careful consideration over
a period of many months rather than rapidly.</p>
<p>Conservancy's application process is somewhat informal. New applicants
should write an initial inquiry email
to <a href="mailto:apply@sfconservancy.org"><apply@sfconservancy.org></a>
with a very brief description of their project and a URL to their project's
website. We'll send back initial questions, and after those questions are
answered, we'll send the full application materials. Applications should
be submitted in plain ASCII text via email. Your application will be
assigned a ticket number in our ticketing system, and please be sure to
include the proper ticket number details in the Subject line of your
emails to ensure they are routed to the right place.</p>
<p>Projects are reviewed by Conservancy's Evaluation Committee, which is
chartered by Conservancy's <a href="/about/board/">Board of
Directors</a>.</p>
<h1>Project Membership Application FAQs</h1>
<p>The following are various questions that we typically get from project
leaders that wish to apply to Conservancy.</p>
<h2>I sent in my inquiry letter and/or application a long time ago. Why haven't you replied?</h2>
<p>Conservancy receives an overwhelming level of interest and we have very few
<a href="/about/staff/">staff positions</a> to
meet the interest and demand
for <a href="/members/services/">Conservancy's
services</a> to its member projects. Meanwhile, Conservancy always
prioritizes needs of
its <a href="/members/current/">existing member
projects</a> over new inquiries and applications. Therefore, it
sometimes can take quite a while to finish the application process and
be offered membership, but please note that such delays mean that should
your project ultimately become a member project, your project will then
be a beneficiary of this policy. Also, generally speaking, we encourage
care and consideration when joining a non-profit and we do not believe
a rapid membership process is in the interest of projects.</p>
<h2>What are the key criteria our project must meet to join?</h2>
<p>In order to join, projects need to meet certain criteria. A rough
outline of those criteria are as follows:</p>
<ul><li>The project must be exclusively devoted to the development and
documentation of FOSS. The project's goals must be consistent with
Conservancy's tax-exempt purposes, and other requirements imposed on
Conservancy by the IRS' 501(c)(3) rules. Namely, the goal of the project
must to develop and document the software in a not-for-profit way to
advance the public good, and must develop the software in public, and
strategically advance software freedom for all users.</li>
<li>The project must be licensed in a way fitting with software freedom
principles. Specifically, all software of the project should be
licensed under a license that is listed both as as
an <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical">Open
Source license by the Open Source Initiative</a> and
as <a href="https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/">DFSG-Free
license</a>. All software documentation for the project should be
licensed under a license on the preceding lists, or under Creative
Commons' <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">CC-By-SA</a>
or <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">CC-By</a> or
<a href="https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/">CC-0</a>.</li>
<li>The project should have an existing, vibrant, diverse community
that develops and documents the software. For example, projects
that have been under development for less than a year or only a
“proof of concept” implementation are generally not
eligible.</li>
</ul>
<p>While any project meeting the criteria above can apply, meeting these
criteria doesn't guarantee acceptance of your project. Conservancy
favors projects that are well-established and have some track record of
substantial contributions from a community of volunteer developers.
Furthermore, Conservancy does give higher priority to projects that
have an established userbase and interest, but also tries to accept some
smaller projects with strong potential.</p>
<h2>Is our project required to accept membership if offered?</h2>
<p>Not at all. Many projects apply and subsequently decide not to join a
non-profit, or decide to join a different non-profit entity. Don't
worry about “wasting our time” if your project's developers
aren't completely sure yet if they want to join Conservancy. If
membership in Conservancy is currently a legitimate consideration for
your project, we encourage you to apply. We'd rather that you apply and
turn down an offer for membership than fail to apply and have to wait
until the next application round when you're sure.</p>
<h2>What benefits does our project get from joining?</h2>
<p>We maintain a <a href="/members/services">detailed list of services
that Conservancy provides to member projects</a>. If you have
detailed questions about any of the benefits, please
ask <a href="mailto:apply@sfconservancy.org"><apply@sfconservancy.org></a>
in your application ticket. We find however that projects will find
Conservancy a better fit if you don't view Conservancy as a service
provider; we are not a service provider in the sense of your hosting
provider or other vendor. Conservancy projects become a part of
Conservancy, and as such membership with Conservancy is an equal
partnership between you and your project and should be treated as such.
If that's not the kind of relationship you want from your fiscal
sponsor, then other options are likely a better fit for your project.</p>
<h2>Conservancy seems to be called a “fiscal sponsor” to its
member projects. Does that mean you give our project money if we join?</h2>
<p>It's true that we would love to fund our member projects if it were
possible, because we believe they deserve to be funded. However, that's
not typically what a fiscal sponsor does. The term “fiscal
sponsor“ is often used in non-profit settings and has a standard
meaning there. But, to those not familiar with non-profit operations,
it comes across as a bit of a misnomer.</p>
<p>In this context, a fiscal sponsor is a non-profit organization that,
rather than fund a project directly, provides the required
infrastructure and facilitates the project's ability to raise its own
funds. Conservancy therefore assists your project in raising funds, and
allows your project to hold those funds and spend them on activities
that simultaneously advance Conservancy's non-profit mission
and the FLOSS development and documentation goals of the project.</p>
<h2>What will the project leaders have to agree to if our project joins?</h2>
<p>Once you're offered membership, Conservancy will send you a draft
fiscal sponsorship agreement (FSA). A template
of <a href="/docs/sponsorship-agreement-template.pdf">Conservancy's FSA
is available in PDF</a> (and
in <a href="/docs/sponsorship-agreement-template.odt">ODT</a>).
Please note that the preceding documents are <strong>only
templates</strong>. Please do not try to fill one out and send it to
Conservancy. The final FSA between Conservancy and your project needs
to be negotiated between us, and as can been seen in the template, the
Representation section needs substantial work. If your project is
offered membership, Conservancy will work with you adapt the FSA
template to suit the needs and specific circumstances of your project.
This is painstaking work, and it's better to complete that work after
both Conservancy and the project are quite sure that they both want the
project to join Conservancy.</p>
<h2>If my project joins Conservancy, how will it change?</h2>
<p>Substantively, member projects continue to operate in the same way as
they did before joining Conservancy. So long as the project remains
devoted to software freedom and operates consistently with the
Conservancy's tax-exempt status, Conservancy does not intervene in the
project's development other than to provide administrative assistance.
For example, Conservancy keeps and maintains books and records for the
project and assists with the logistics of receiving donations, but does
not involve itself with technical or artistic decision making. Projects
are asked, however, to keep Conservancy up to date on their
activities.</p>
<p>Additionally, when Conservancy discovers or becomes aware of any legal,
licensing or PR issues regarding your project, Conservancy will contact the
project and ask you to work collectively with Conservancy.</p>
<h2>Once our project joins, who holds its assets (money, copyrights, trademarks, etc.)?</h2>
<p>Conservancy holds assets on behalf of its member projects and
manages and disburses those assets in accordance with the wishes of the
project's leadership, as long as those wishes are consistent with non-profit
rules, requirements, and Conservancy's mission. Funds received by Conservancy on behalf of a
project are kept track of separately for each specific project and the
management of those funds is directed by the project. For example, if a
donor wanted to contribute $100 to Project Foo, they would formally make
the donation to Conservancy and identify Project Foo as the desired
project to support. Conservancy would then deposit the check and
earmark the funds for use by Project Foo. Project Foo would then tell the
Conservancy how that money should be spent. As long as that expense is a
legitimate non-profit expense fitting with Conservancy's non-profit
mission, Conservancy pays the expense on the Project's behalf.</p>
<p>Similarly, any copyrights, trademarks, domain name or other assets
transferred to a project are typically held by Conservancy on behalf of
the project. A significant service that Conservancy provides its
members is a vehicle through which copyright ownership in the project can
be unified. There are several advantages to having a consolidated
copyright structure, including that it makes enforcement activity easier
and more effective. However, copyright, trademark, and domain name
assignment is not a requirement in order to join Conservancy, rather,
it is an option for those projects that ask for it.</p>
<h2>If our project joins, must it be a member project of Conservancy forever?</h2>
<p>All agreements between member projects and Conservancy stipulate
clearly that the member project can leave Conservancy with a few
months' notice. Federal tax exemption law, though, states that projects
must transfer their assets from Conservancy in a way that is
consistent with Conservancy's not-for-profit tax status —
meaning the assets cannot be transferred to an individual or a for-profit
entity. Generally, a project would either find another fiscal sponsor or
form their own independent tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit.</p>
<p>We fully expect that some Conservancy projects will ultimately wish to
form their own non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations; that's why we design
our agreements with projects to allow them to leave to another 501(c)(3)
organization. Typically, projects join Conservancy because the project
leaders don't want the burdens of running a non-profit themselves.
Often, as projects grow, leaders get interested in the non-profit
management and organizational side of the activities and are then
prepared to take on the additional work themselves.</p>
<h2>How are “project leaders” defined with respect to Conservancy?</h2>
<p>How leaders are chosen for projects varies greatly from project to
project. Our goal is to do our best to embody the “natural”
leadership structure that evolved in your project into the formal
agreement with Conservancy. As part of the agreement drafting, we work
carefully with you to understand your project's governance and write up
formally with you the decision-making process you use. Most project
contributors find this process of formalizing the leadership structure
helps them clarify in their own minds the governance of their project,
even though the process can be difficult. Since it can be a complicated
process, we suggest that you prepare your project community for this
discussion once your project is accepted.</p>
<h2>How much does it cost us financially to join Conservancy?</h2>
<p>New Conservancy members are required to pay 10% of their revenue that
Conservancy processes to Conservancy's general fund, which primarily is
used to pay staff. (Details on how Conservancy spends its funds,
including salaries of key employees, can be found
in <a href="/about/filings/">Conservancy's
annual filings</a>.)</p>
<p>Historically, Conservancy allowed projects to give less or nothing at
all to the general fund, but we unfortunately discovered that without
this requirement, Conservancy was not able to offer the myriad of
services to all its projects, particularly to larger projects that
have more income and therefore need more attention from staff. Even now,
the 10% we receive from our project does not fully fund our fiscal
sponsorship activities; we raise additional funds
through <a href="/sustainer">support program</a> to subsidize our fiscal
sponsorship work.</p>
<p>We do understand that, particularly for small projects that only receive a
few small donations, that donating a percentage of your income back to
Conservancy can be a high burden. We encourage such small projects to
consider <a href="https://www.spi-inc.org/">Software in the Public
Interest</a>, which offers fewer services than Conservancy, but only
requires 5% of gross revenue. To our knowledge, SPI is the only fiscal
sponsor operating in FOSS that requires less than 10%; most FOSS fiscal
sponsors require at least 10%, or they operate on a fee-for-service model
whereby projects pay the actual costs of any service they receive (and such
charges are usually much higher than 10%). We urge you to very explicitly
ask about these issues with any fiscal sponsor you consider.</p>
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