software-conservancy-evaluation.txt

Michael,

Your project may be a good candidate for Conservancy.  The only item
that gives me some pause is that we're typically a home for software
projects, not for standards, although I do see you have a reference
implementation.  Nevertheless, I think it's worth applying to
Conservancy.  Our application process is relatively informal.  The
materials are below:

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Conservancy's Evaluation Committee meets monthly.  While I cannot
guarantee your project will be evaluated in a specific month (the meeting
lasts one hour and we push through as many application as we can), getting
your application in by the end of any given month means that at least your
project will be on the agenda for the following month's meeting.  You
project will of course stay on the agenda until the Evaluation Committee
gets to it.
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The Software Freedom Conservancy encourages your project to apply for
Conservancy.  Please be advised that applying doesn't guarantee your
project can join Conservancy; it's simply the first step in the process
of joining Conservancy.

Please note that Conservancy currently has a long queue for project
applications, so we cannot assure you when you will receive a response to
your application.  Feel free to ping Conservancy at any time to inquire
about the status of your application.

To apply to the Conservancy, please answer fully all the questions below,
in a *single* text-only (i.e., not HTML) email to
<apply@sfconservancy.org>.  Please try to be as concise as possible while
making sure to answer the questions fully.

If the relevant information is already gathered and publicly available,
It's ok to include URLs as answers.  However, if a given URL has lots of
information on it, please make sure that you direct us specifically to
the portions of the web page loaded by the given URL that are relevant in
answering the question.

Conservancy Application Questions:

*** Why does your project want to join Conservancy?  Specifically, what
    benefits do you expect to take advantage of immediately and within a
    few years?

*** Conservancy does encourage projects to apply to multiple non-profit
    homes to find the best fit.  Does your project have an application
    pending with any other non-profit homes?  What do you see as the pros
    and cons of the various organizations you've applied to?

*** Please give a detailed description of the project.

*** What FLOSS License(s) does your project use?  Please include the
    primary license, and list other licenses for code that is included.
    (e.g., "The project as a whole is GPLv3-or-later, but about a dozen
    files in the directory src/external/ are under the Apache-2.0
    license").  Please be sure to include information on documentation
    licensing as well as software licensing.

*** Please give us your roadmap and plans for future development of the
    project, including both code and community plans.

*** Please give us the main link to the projects primary website.

*** Please give us a URL to a code repository we can clone and/or
    checkout.

*** Have you ever had funds held by the project, or by any individual on
    behalf of the project?  How and for what did you spend those funds?
    Are there funds remaining?  If so, who is holding them now?

*** Do you have any ongoing fundraising programs for your project?  How do
    they operate, and how much funding is brought in through these mechanisms
    currently?  Where do you expect most of your donor base to be
    geographically?

*** Going forward, once inside Conservancy, how do you expect to spend funds
    that you raise?  What types of activity do you want to ask Conservancy to
    take on your behalf?  Where geographically do you want those activities
    to take place?

*** Is your project able and willing to participate in fundraising
    campaigns with Conservancy on an annual or perhaps more frequent
    basis?

*** Does your project owe funds to anyone?

*** Who currently holds your projects' trademarks, if any?  When was your
    projects' name first used, and who used it?

*** Does you project have a logo?  If so, who drew it, when did they draw
    it, where is it displayed and what is its license?

*** Are you aware of anyone in your project, individual or company,
    holding a patent in any jurisdiction that are in any way related to
    your project?

*** Has your project ever had legal trouble, been involved in legal
    proceedings or received a letter accusing your project of patent,
    copyright, trademark or other types of infringement?

*** Please give a brief history of the project, focusing on how the
    community developed and the general health of the community.  Be sure
    to include information on any forks or other disputes that have
    occurred in the community.

*** Please explain how your project is governed.  Who makes the decisions
    in the project?  How do you resolve disputes, particularly about
    non-code issues?

*** Does your project currently offer, or wish to offer any consulting or
    training services (such as deployment, administration or other such
    services of the software for users) to your user base?  If so, how do
    you structure (or seek to structure) this work?

*** Is anyone in the project currently offering a Software as a Service
    system based on project?  If so, how is that offering governed,
    coordinated and is the software that runs the service made fully
    available to your users?

*** If your project runs on Linux-based systems, please list all the
    distributions that include your project, and what "repository area"
    the package appears in.  If you aren't packaged for any major
    distributions, please tell us why you believe your project hasn't been
    packaged yet.

*** Does your project have any existing for-profit or non-profit
    affiliations, funding relationships, or other agreements between the
    project and/or key leaders of your project and other organizations?
    Has the project had such affiliations in the past?  Please list of all
    of them in detail and explain their nature. Even tangential
    affiliations and relationships, or potential affiliations that you
    plan to create should be included.

*** Approximately how many users does your project have, and what items
    lead you to believe your userbase is of a particular size (e.g., post
    counts to your user mailing list)?

*** Please list the names, email addresses, and affiliations (e.g.,
    employer) of key developers and major contributors.  Include both
    current and past contributors and developers.  Please include date
    ranges of when those developers/contributors were active.

    Please make this list as extensive and complete as possible.  You need
    not include every last person who sent one patch, but please include
    at least those who regularly sent patches or were/are regular
    contributors.  If you project has contributors who have been inactive
    for more than five years, you need only to list such inactive
    contributors if they made substantial contributions.

*** Please include any other pertinent information not given above that
    you feel we should review with your application.

Please note that your answers will be shared with Conservancy's Board of
Directors, its Evaluation Committee (the membership of which is
published on Conservancy's website), and with some of Conservancy's
existing member projects leaders.  We like to get as much input as
possible from Conservancy's existing project base when evaluating new
projects for membership.

Please submit the application in pure ASCII format, with paragraph fills
and line breaks designed for 80 column viewing.  You don't need to
impress us with formatting; what will actually impress us is if you make
the information presented in a simple and clear way that is easily read
and understood when edited with GNU Emacs and emailed around internally
at Conservancy via standard email forwarding tools.

Before completing your application, please be sure to read our
application FAQ at: http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/

Feel free to include any additional information you'd like us to review
in considering an application, but please try to be brief as possible.

Please note that Conservancy does require that projects consider donating
a percentage of their funding to the general operating costs of the
Conservancy.  This is a way to assure we can continue providing a high
level of service to all Conservancy projects.  We'll discuss this further
and in detail after the evaluation process.

Please be advised that you may get follow-up clarification questions on
your application.  Please be prepared to respond to these inquiries
quickly to assure timely processing of your application.
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--
Bradley M. Kuhn
President & Distinguished Technologist of Software Freedom Conservancy