Outreachy brings people who are subject to systemic bias or underrepresented in tech into free software via paid internships. MicroBlocks is a new programming language that enables kids and lifelong learners to start building toys or tools right away. Teaching Open Source collects and advises on curricula that help college students understand open source development and its legal underpinnings. North Bay Python is a community-driven conference serving local Python developers—including beginners. The longevity of the free software movement depends on our collective ability to bring in new contributors.
Funding Development Work: In 2019 so far, our member projects paid 21 different people for FOSS contributions. Collectively, our projects, including Common Workflow Language, Godot, Microblocks, Outreachy (not including the intern payments), phpMyAdmin, Reproducible Builds, Selenium and Teaching Open Source paid contributors over $489,615 for everything from project organization to software development to translation. In all these cases, Conservancy handles most of the administration, including contract negotiation, legal compliance, work review, payments, and tax reporting.
+Funding Development Work: In 2019 so far, our member projects paid 21 different people for FOSS contributions. Collectively, our projects, including Common Workflow Language, Godot, Microblocks, Outreachy (not including the intern payments), phpMyAdmin, Reproducible Builds, Selenium and Teaching Open Source paid contributors almost half a million dollars for everything from project organization to software development to translation. In all these cases, Conservancy handles most of the administration, including contract negotiation, legal compliance, work review, payments, and tax reporting.
Facilitating FOSS Conferences: Regular face-to-face collaboration remains essential for projects like ours that do nearly all their work remotely. We and our projects ran a dozen conferences and hackfests—negotiating and spending thousands of dollars to make each of these conferences a success. Our experience with vendors, hotels and travel visas helps streamline much of the routine work so our projects can get back to doing what they’re good at. For example we reimbursed over $100,000 just in travel and other conference expenses to over 100 different individuals.