ClearlyDefined Fiscal Sponsorship Annual Reports

Version 4.1 by Patrick Masson on 2020/01/16 23:34

In addition to the below 2018 report, additional annual reports are attached.
2019 Annual Report


ClearlyDefined Fiscal Sponsorship Annual Reports

Due Date of Report: The due date for the report is January 1st.

If you have questions on reporting requirements, please check with OSI staff at osi@opensource.org.

Type of submission (please check one):

✓ This report completes the requirements for the current year of participation in the fiscal sponsorship program. We will be continuing in the program.

Group name: ClearlyDefined

Address: 855 El Camino Real, Ste 13A, #270
 Palo Alto, CA 94301

United States

Telephone: (415) 857-5398

Email: clearlydefined@googlegroups.com

Website: clearlydefined.io

Contact person and role in group: Carol Smith, Program Manager; Board Director and Project Sponsor, OSI

Dates report covers from: 1/11/18 to 12/20/18

Submit cover sheet, 3-5 page report, and financial information to: osi@opensource.org Feel free to contact our office at (415) 857-5398 or email us at osi@opensource.org with any questions regarding this report or its submission.

Yearly Report Questions and Required Information: Please send us a short report about the fiscal sponsorship project’s progress. We hope that this will be an informal 2-3 page narrative report plus a financial accounting.


Impact and Assessment

  1. Please restate the goal and objectives as stated in your original proposal and describe progress made.

Our mission is to help FOSS projects be more successful through clearly defined project data. Ambiguities around license metadata and vulnerabilities mean that FOSS cannot be consumed with confidence. This impacts adoption and success of FOSS and drives duplication in the compliance and security maintenance work for consumers. With ClearlyDefined, we propose crowdsourcing the curation of licensing, security, accessibility, and other data for FOSS projects. This project will harvest data embedded in FOSS and available in the broader community, and subsequently: curate the data in an open and collaborative process, contribute clearly defined data back to the FOSS projects, and make the data freely and easily accessible. The project will initially focus on licensing data that facilitates understanding and complying with the legal obligations related to using FOSS. This includes license (declared and discovered), copyright holders, and source location (including revision/commit).

We reached feature complete for the initial functionality in 2018 and now are making improvements and focusing on adoption and integration next year. We intend to scope the security work early in 2019.


  1. What was most effective? Response should include both qualitative and quantitative impacts where possible.

Finding the right metaphors to describe the project has helped quite a bit. Many of our initial conversations with potential users didn’t accurately place this project in context. Our conversations have been much more frank and fruitful and we have multiple potential users who may be able to move forward with integration soon.

Keeping the project specifically scoped to license data has also been helpful for our development work. It has helped us prioritize the development work we are executing with contractors as well as framing our goals and scope for the project with our users.

Finally, our projects’ alignment with OSI’s mission has benefitted us significantly. Our users understand the importance of clear license data about FOSS projects and see the OSI as an appropriate vendor- and organization-neutral body to support this data project.


  1. Please identify specific groups and communities that benefited from your program, including, if possible, the total number of people included in these groups or communities.

We currently have multiple organizations (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) helping to run the infrastructure, which has benefitted them and the project itself. We’ve begun to see projects upstream adopting practices that will make themselves more clearly defined in future versions, which we hope will grow significantly in 2019.

You can find a list of all our current partners here: https://clearlydefined.io/about

Our users are currently corporations which are benefiting from using the data in production settings as part of their compliance workflows.


  1. Please identify the benefits provided to the program groups or communities.

The data is freely available to anyone to use, we hope as adoption grows and more communities are relying on the ClearlyDefined data there will be more certainly around the license of projects and that will drive adoption of those projects.

The data quality is also demonstrably on par with data provided by vendors for a fee. Providing this data for free where it was previously offered for a fee will continue to benefit users over time.

Challenges

  1. Please list any changes of project plans in light of changing issues or significant challenges, whether expected or unexpected, and how dealt with them.


The project structure has not changed significantly, but the details of implementation and execution have become more defined over time. We understand now more precisely how to communicate to potential users what the project is.

The user interface and website portion of the project has also ended up being larger in scope than we initially anticipated. We have adjusted to this and all the necessary features that users and curators need in order to make use of or change the data have been implemented. We have identified more potential improvements and plan to continue work on them in 2019.

Evaluation and Lessons Learned

  1. Description of your evaluation process; please indicate who was involved and when it happened.

We evaluated our progress on 2018 as well as did our planning for 2019. This was done on December 18, 2018.

We provided feedback to OSI on our experience as a fiscal sponsoree along with the submission of this document.

  1. What have you learned? Please describe any lessons or insights from the past year that you intend to apply in the future.

Much of the learnings over the last year have been around the implementation details of how the software will work and function. We’ve learned much more about how users will consume this data when it’s available. We’ve also heard from many users that they are interested in the ClearlySecure project getting off the ground, and we will prioritize scoping that work in 2019.

  1. How did the funding you received during the year make a difference in your work?

The funding we’ve received has entirely been allocated to contract development work on the software and website for ClearlyDefined. This has meant we’ve been able to add features and functionality as well as make significant improvements in the software we could not have otherwise made. Our volunteer resources are very limited, and so the funding has enabled to build the project according to our specifications more quickly than if we had relied only on volunteer time.

Overall, this funding has been the crux of all the development we’ve done. It’s also meant that the development is primarily done by neutral parties who aren’t associated with a particular organization or company.

Funding and Finances

  1. Total funds received by your organization from The OSI during the reporting period.

    1. $175,000
  2. Itemize how these funds were spent.






Statement of Activity Comparison



November 2018




RevenueNov 2018Jan – Nov, 2018 (YTD)
  Contributions, Sponsorship, and Membership Revenue

  Contributions - Temporarily Restricted

     Contributions - Clearly Defined$0$175,000
  Total Contributions - Temporarily Restricted$0$175,000
  Total Contributions, Sponsorship, and Membership Revenue$0$175,000
Total Revenue$0$175,000



Expenditures

  Other Expenses

  Bank & Credit Card Fees

     Bank & Wire Transfer Fees$152$653
  Total Bank & Credit Card Fees$152$653
  Total Other Expenses$152$653



  Program Service Expense

  Clearly Defined Expense

     Administrative fee expense-OSI
$17,500
     Development-ClearlyDefined$20,000$90,260
  Total Clearly Defined Expense$20,000$107,760
  Total Program Service Expense$20,000$107,760
Total Expenditures$20,152$108,413



Net Income-$20,152$66,587



  1. Please attach the following items:
    1. Attach a budget for your current fiscal year.
      1. $20,000 - January contract development work
      2. $20,000 - February contract development work
    2. Attach a list of pending and planned funding requests for the year.

    3. Please attach a list of the organization’s Board of Directors/Coordinating Committee/Or Other Decision Making Body.  This list must include full names, title if any (i.e. board president, board chair, board treasurer, etc.), home address and telephone number, e-mail address and amount of any compensation paid by the organization to each member of the committee if applicable.

      1. Carol Smith, contact information on file with OSI
    4. A list of all staff and/or core volunteers.  (There is no need to replicate the list of Board of Directors/Coordinating Committee/Or Other Decision Making Body in this list).
      1. Jeff McAffer
      2. Dan Butvinik
      3. Alessandro Russo
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