Most of you know me as President of the Open Source Initiative, but I am also Chair of the Fundraising Committee. Over the years we have raised monies large and small from companies large and small, public and private, and we have had great participation from individual donors as well. In fact, this year was probably a record in terms of the total number of different people supporting the OSI--which is cause alone to celebrate.
However, as a 501(c)3 organization with no endowment on which to draw interest from, fundraising is something that we must always do in order to fund our operations and expenses. In 2007 we:
- Lauched our new website (approx 200K hits per month)
- Posted a new Terms of Service
- Seated a new Board
- Discussed and approved several licenses
- Discussed and rejected/deferred a few licenses
- Served our mission of education and advocacy via publication of blogs and articles on the website
- Served our mission of education and advocacy by attending and presenting at a number of Open Source conferences around the world
- Established new policies for license discuss
- Unblocked a large backlog of minutes
...and there's much more we would like to do.
The OSI is also in the process of evaluating candidates for a Program Director position. We are actively discussing how to better serve our global audience by supporting trusted translations of important web pages, and also discussing ways to engage national governments in discussions of open source topics where English is not the native language. And we are setting our travel budgets and schedules for face-to-face board meetings and conference participation which is non-trivial with board members coming from the North America, South America, Europe, India, and Africa.
But with your help (which includes financial as well as participatory help), we can do all this and more. So, please consider making a donation to the OSI, and please continue to participate in the discussion, advocate for Open Source, and invite others to join the cause. To donate click on http://opensource.org/donate .
Thank you, and Happy hacking!
Michael Tiemann