With the end of the year comes the time for donations And this year, I thought it would be nice to give a chance to anyone interested to contribute to the list of recipient organizations.
Of course, there is a near infinite list of good causes or projects that would be worth helping, so the list is necessarily going to be incomplete. For OpenCraftās contributions, Iāve so far focused on these aspects, but we can revise the list together:
Organizations with a proven track record of efficiency (ie independently proven high ratio of donation to effect - see https://www.givewell.org/)
Contributing to open source sustainability, in particular for projects/communities we use a lot
Education
Compensating negative effects from OpenCraftās activities - specifically the CO2 emissions from flights to the conference/clients, as well as the energy use of datacenters
Here is the list of organizations that Iām considering for our financial contributions to this year - do you see anything important missing? Or better recipients?
GiveDirectly - Basic income program, via Effektiv Spenden
Kiva - Micro lending to small borrowers without access to the banking system (repayments recycled on an ongoing basis)
Iām also looking into Tidelift, as a way to extend more broadly the support to extensions we use. The details are a bit fuzzy though, so Iāve booked a meeting with them.
NB: One that might be surprisingly absent from this list is edX / Open edX ā this is because they already have a lot of very wealthy donors, as well as a good income stream, so any financial contribution from us would be a drop in the ocean. Our best way to contribute is through our code and work on the project - which then makes it, by very far, the top recipient
I love seeing the PSF and DSF in that list
If I had to pick one similar I might suggests the Free Software Foundation (FSF) who, as best I can tell, sponsors the whole family of GNU tools, mv, cp, Bash, Screen, GCC, just to name a few and countless other tools that enables every computer to be amazing.
I cannot speak to the FSFās track record of efficiency, I would understand if there are concerns about that organization, I am not 100% up to date on their policies and procedures.
They are highly transparent about how they use money and get very good scores. They already receive a lot in donations (specially after the $1M BTC in 2018) and now have>$3M in assets. A smaller one in comparison is FSF Europe which moves less money (finances) but is important to protect Europeās legislation. And theyāre tax-deductible in Germany. But I didnāt evaluate in detail how both of them use their money; what I know is they donāt waste it.
The CO2 ones are important. At least to compensate the bad contributions (pollution) until we find a long-term solution. As a remote company, we donāt pollute the planet much via transportation, but we do via electricity. I guess itās not much but I didnāt calculate it. But yesterday and due to different reasons I was researching which companies produce most CO2 in Spain, and many of them are the companies that provide electricity to homes, so the electricityāāCO2 link is near and itās easy to study. (Theyāre also improving).
Fighting deforestation is a challenge too.
Donations to software projects like Django or Python: Iām always afraid that they get so much that they start āinnovatingā and rewriting everything and redesigning the languageā¦ (I think Python and Django are complete enough). But maybe they want money to spread the current software to more people, which would be only good.
Iāll have to check.
This seems important and could be displayed in OpenCraftās website if they are on-topic.
However, āeducationā is a broad word that contains many conflictive topics and per se isnāt a good thing. It all depends on the topic.
It looks like a service company (providing support for third-party software). If thereās āconsiderationā it wouldnāt count as donation.
In any case, donating is hard. I want to learn more before having a solid opinion.
And by the way, this is a great initiative (letting many people comment or suggest the donations made by the company). Only, if run big-scale it can create conflicts when people want to support conflicting organizations (I know about a similar approach that started well and worked well but ended in politics).
For the FSF, we have actually been a donor/member historically, but Iāve stopped it for a few reasons. First, they already have a lot of money, so I donāt think it would help much to add to that big reserve. Second, they havenāt done anything really impactful for quite a whileā¦ Itās good that they are around, and if they were in danger that would be different, but it feels like they have become a bit complacent, and I donāt want to encourage that. Last, and maybe most controversially, I was very disappointed with their handling of the controversy surrounding RMS and his resignation - for an organization meant to protect freedom, bowing to mob rule without consideration for the actual facts was disheartening.
Given the annual budgets they target, they really wouldnāt have enough funds to rewrite everything :) This seem to be more for organization of events, advocacy, etc ā ie yes, bringing more people to the project, bringing the community and volunteers together, and doing the minimum to run the foundation and its online services.
Thatās fine - as far as I understand it, there arenāt a lot of incentives to have āpureā donations in Germany anyway ā it requires to give to a non-profit implanted in Germany, and able to produce German tax receipts. So anything donated to structures outside Germany doesnāt countā¦ And even in cases where it is the case, it merely allows to count the expense as an operating expense ā which is also the case for anything the company expenses for its own operation ā¦which would be the case of a āsupportā license, like Tidelift offers.
+1 to that question - if anyone thinks of any that also provides a way to donate to them, let me know, Iām happy to look into it.
I havenāt heard back from Tidelift yet, but looking at Github sponsors, they provide a way to quickly list all the projects that we use and could sponsor through them - likely based on the dependencies from our github repos (so that wouldnāt include code we host on gitlab, though). See:
So here is a survey based on that list - have a look, and see if you spot some projects worth contributing to? As an experiment, Iāll make us donate to any author from a project that has at least two votes, and the more votes for a given authorās project(s) the more weāll donate :)
This is sorted using Githubās āmost usedā prioritization (the most used being shown first, which seem based on the number of our repos listing it), with some alterations to group the repos of prolific authors together. Feel free to pick as many as you would like, but focus projects you recognize and appreciate ā and donāt feel like you have to review all the list in detail:
If you notice any project we should donate to that is missing (and allows donations), let me know too, with a link to their donation page.
Probably āThe OpenBSD Foundationā? OpenBSDās development team maintains OpenSSH and other critical software, we use it on our every server. Donation page.
@demid Thanks for the addition! I canāt edit the polls now that others have voted, so instead I will use the number of likes on your post as votes Same thing if others suggest new entries - if there is one entry the likes will be the votes, and with multiple entries create a poll similar to mine, public and which allows multiple votes, and closes at the end of the day on December 28th.
Yikes look at all those repeated usernames who are publishers of all those tiny, pervasive, pointless javascript/node libraries, who arenāt helping the horrible situation with the huge insecure node_modules dependency tree in every projectā¦ Iād prefer if we didnāt support that. Remember the left-pad incident?
Thank you for the votes and additional nominations! As planned, I have made the additional donations to the projects & authors from the polls. All projects with at least two votes should have received a donation, with the items with more votes getting more. It gives a final list of donated projects & authors for 2020, with the ones donated to more listed first:
GiveDirectly
Kiva
Atmosfair
Django Software Foundation
Python Software Foundation
encode / django-rest-framework
Freedom of the Press Foundation
Mozilla
Tor
Letās Encrypt
EFF
OpenBSD Foundation
Foundation 22 Stars
nedbat / coveragedotpy
Internet Archive
OpenSSL
eslint
jpadilla / django-rest-framework-jwt
Babel
urllib3
OBS Studio
PostgreSQL
Vim
Anki
Let me know if there is anything surprising, wrong or missing in that list.
Thank you for making these donations @antoviaque, and for your care in deciding where the money will do the most good. Yet another reason Iām proud to work for OpenCraft.
And this year, I thought it would be nice to give a chance to anyone interested to contribute to the list of recipient organizations.
Iād prefer if we didnāt support that. Remember the