Snowdrift Prototyping

Project Sponsor(s)

Allsion Randall, OSI
allison@opensource.org

Aaron Wolf
aaron@snowdrift.coop

Project Scope

Snowdrift.coop is prototyping a new form of cooperative community sponsorship / long-term patronage for Open Source projects. While we hope long-term to operate as a full foundation handling donations between large numbers of donors and projects, this proposal is to support the prototyping stage. At this stage, we are focused on creating, presenting, and studying the concept of a network-driven many-to-many matching pledge as a mechanism to improve overall support for Open Source (see: full project proposal).

Implementation

The donations are made to OSI, but are marked for SnowdriftProto.

The OSI charges a small overhead for administrative costs, and passes the remainder of those donations along to Snowdrift.coop.

Snowdrift.coop is now taking donations at https://snowdrift.coop/donate — That page currently references the option of donating via OSI as fiscal sponsor but on a case-by-case basis that will not be automated. The Paypal, Dwolla, and Bitcoin links on the page otherwise do not go through OSI currently and will not qualify for the 501(c)(3) terms.

OSI will receive donations in the form of checks (USD) made to the OSI, but denoted with "SnowdriftProto" (i.e., distinguishing them from donations meant for OSI). The OSI bookkeeper will break out the Snowdrift.coop donations in a monthly report to the OSI. 

[TBD] Snowdrift.coop will invoice the OSI for disbursements as needed, providing enough description each time for us to be satisfied that the activities were indeed within OSI's mission as well as within OpenHatch's (not that there's any practical doubt about either; it's just to make sure we're all square in case the IRS ever wants documentation).

When we were originally planning fiscal sponsorships, we considered having a page at http://opensource.org/ that offers a donation button to our fiscal sponsors too. But lack of interest from original Fiscal Sponsor, OpenHatch, removed this from consideration.

Management & Administration

Snowdrift.coop and OSI will make a joint announcement when Snowdrift.coop is ready to kick the Prototyping fund-raising drive into high gear. We'll figure out the content of any such announcements when the time comes; they shouldn't be too hard to write, considering that OSI fully supports what Snowdrift.coop is doing with their project.

Documentation

Agreement (view)

Annual Report(s) (view)