The ground you’re covering overlaps some with work we did at Sustain earlier this year, and in subsequent working groups, to define some proposed Principles of Authentic Participation as well as a loosely defined transparency goal and some proposed Goals for Corporate Accountability (shown at the top of the transparency goal link).
@DuaneOBrien, thanks for making me aware of this. I would love to plug into any working groups that exist or help facilitate them. I think we align very closely with some of the attributes already defined. @RichardLitt mentioned you as someone I should connect with so thanks for reaching out! For context, we aren’t a political organization, we are an early-stage financial services startup trying to bring equity (purposeful overloading of the term here) to open source with the hope of eventually making open source projects directly investable. This is the model of our Groundwater Program.
I’d be interested in seeing how you’re working to calculate business value realized from dependency analysis, as I’ve been doing similar work. I don’t see anything on the site or on GitHub about how you’re proposing to approach the problem. Is there anything you’d be willing to share?
Today we seek to tie business value to open source by working with Groundwater companies to commit and allocate equity (or equity equivalents) to their dependencies in a manner that both parties agree is fair (initially this is a judgment call as we refine the definition). This is analogous to an employee being granted stock options for contributing their experience, knowledge, relationships, and intellectual property to the company. We have various levels (and badges) depending on whether they meet a certain threshold. We recognize other forms of contribution as valuable as well, such as cash, tokens, and in-kind contributions such as having an in house OS office or dev team. We want to manage these “contribution tables” for companies and work with project governance to do the same, with the addition of contributors. In aggregation with other data partners (must be part of our Groundwater network) and with more people participating in the program we can begin to assemble more formulaic definitions of value.
I’m also reminded of the move made by Citus Data to donate 1% of their equity to PostgreSQL non-profits. That was timely, given their acquisition by Microsoft a few months later.
Thanks for this example, I was unaware. Also, another example is Anaconda, listed here. We are get excited seeing early signs that this may be a viable alternative for open source sustainability.