 Let's see. Oh, you can hear me. Just fine. It's almost like people here have been doing this a long time That is magical though. I just turned it on and no way we went. We still have a couple minutes Yeah, go ahead and get a totally candid shot piece of food in my mouth. Yeah Was that candid enough? Yeah, okay I'll sit here and make long meaningful eye contact with Stephanie. Yeah, that's all right. Oh, I'm on the news I did get some people singing happy birthday outside. Yeah, so that'll work. That's about as candid as it's gonna get It I you know, I do agree interacting with human beings is pretty good. So Thank you for coming coming to the much coveted last speaking slot of the scale event it is Not a tradition for me to speak in this lot, but it's not my first time I know some of you have flights to catch and a bunch of other stuff So I really appreciate you coming and spending some time with me. I tend to talk fast I tend to run out of breath when I talk fast. So I'm gonna try to occasionally Take a nice breath and slow down My name is Duane O'Brien The talk is 10 years of open-source trending fun corporate sponsorship funding trends looking back from 2014 to 2023 I've got a small consultancy and an email address here that you can contact feel free to come up and Talk to me after the event as well. Now just a real quick note on questions. I have so much material in here I already know I'm not gonna get through it, but my flight isn't until 6 30 So I'm gonna push questions to the end If folks have to rush to a flight at the end and you need to get something in while everyone's here I'll prioritize your questions. Otherwise, I can hang out for a couple of hours and and just dig into this subject and talk with folks so About me I I build and advise open-source programs offices. I've been doing that for coming up on 10 years now I think a lot about open-source sustainability in particularly I focus on thinking about the funding aspect of sustainability How money flows into the ecosystem in particular from the corporate side of the ecosystem? I'm a board member at the open-source collective And I am a visiting technologist fellow fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University Which is a lot to say all in one breath I want to give some disclaimers before I come in I don't speak for a company a foundation a sponsor a sponsor or an entity. I traveled here under my own auspices This is just representing some research that I have been doing so far. I'm also as will become obvious I'm not an artist. I'm not a dataist. I'm not a scientist. I'm not an economist. I'm barely anist of any kind so when if you have deep questions about Data and data science wrong person design wrong person economy wrong person just some observations that I hope will get us started on the on the discussion I Really tried to present only data that is publicly available and verifiable Some of it may ultimately be wrong. Some of it is still work in progress If you see things that you know are obviously wrong I would love it if you would help me collect correct that now some background on the project I Submitted a proposal to the first digital sorry to the second round of the critical digital infrastructure Fund put together by Ford Foundation and Sloan Foundation and a couple of other funders I submitted that proposal back in 2020 it was accepted for this project called fostering open collaboration Which you know sometimes you'll see the word focused through here Which is where that that comes from and the the original premise of the research was if we just provided some Cross-company visibility into all the dependencies that we were using Would that be enough to spurt to spur corporate investment into the ecosystem or would you need to put other incentives on the table to get companies working together So we started that research in 2021 and it moved all over the place right Ospo's came and went economy came and went there were some other things going around and from 2020 to 2023 You may remember and so the the nature of the research shifted and moved a lot And and we landed on This this investigation right now that I'm finding very interesting We know that companies of all sizes engage in sponsorship or free and open source foundations events and projects and programs But we don't have any visibility across companies or across sponsors or across foundations of how those sponsorship trends Actually look if you have a long history in a company and you're involved in that end of the funding Decision-making you probably know about where you've spent money over the last few years But the rest of us don't if you live within the Python software foundation You know who your sponsors are and who tends to come and go but looking at it across foundations We don't really have that view so I wanted to try to pull together a view that we could all use And really ask like how have these sponsorship dollars flowed and I focused on the last 10 years Just so I could try to time-bound some of the investigation So we did this for some expanded visibility But we also wanted to provide the ability for funders and for sponsors and for Sponsors to coordinate on our efforts a little bit to make sure that we aren't all picking the same five things to fund That we are making sure that we can identify underfunded projectors or underfunded Foundations and mobilize to support those when the economy turns up and down And long-term I really would like to see us have some conversation around account accountability around the dependence of our Organizations on open source versus how much we're investing in open source as an ecosystem and as a community That subject is not one we're going to cover in the talk here, but that's sort of the long-term vision of it Now how I went about this analysis We would pick a particular sponsor and in this presentation I'm going to cover findings from four nonprofits and from two events We've done broader investigations We dug in to find historical sponsorship Perspectives we use the way back machine to go back and look at their sponsors pages And I picked this point July 1st as a midpoint in the year when most people have probably Signed and settled their sponsorships There's some particular funders and corporate sponsors whose calendar years don't align to their fiscal years But July 1 seemed to be as good a place as any depict to get the reasonably accurate results and then I pulled information from 990s As part of the broader research I pulled information from Crunchbase and SEC filings that I also won't be going into in this But to give and I pulled all these perspectives together In a fast perspectives archive. So everything that I've used To get at the data is available in GitHub. It's not licensed because I don't own it But it's all publicly available material that I've put in one place I don't I don't know how to license that so it to read me at the and the read me You'll just say this isn't mine, but it's publicly available So to be specific Here is a scale prospectus from 2024 I would go through and look and see the platinum sponsor their package price for the platinum sponsor is $13,000 if I go to the scale page and I see the cloud native computing foundation has sponsored as a platinum sponsor Then I'm going to go into the spreadsheet and I'm going to say Google or the cloud native computing foundation sponsored it for $12,500 or whatever the sponsorship prospectus amount was now there are some assumptions in that and one is that That's how much they paid right and in some cases in particular foundations They might have paid more or given more to the foundation and they're just shown as a top-level sponsor Or there are other places where that might be wrong But there's an inherent assumption if it says it costs this much in the prospectus And that said they're showing is that level on the site then that's how much we're going to assume that they spent now I'm going to dig into the subjects a little bit The foundations I've looked at so far are the Apache software foundation the Linux foundation NumFocus the open source initiative the Python software foundation and software freedom Conservancy If I jump into using acronyms, which I'm going to try not to do those are the acronyms If you're not familiar with them in the presentation We're going to look at Apache Linux OSI and open source initiative and Python software foundation I made it one sentence without using an acronym For events we looked at all things open open source summit North America scale and seagull In this presentation, we're going to look at scale and open source summit North America And then I also did some digging into the outreach you project, which I'm not going to cover but Because they follow the same approach if you sponsored a certain level then you show up at a certain level as a Sponsor we could get it some interesting information there now I want to give some I'm going to give some caveats for all of this information. I promised you a deep dive You're getting I put season wrong order. I promised you a deep dive you're going to get an awkward shallow dive because this information is difficult to wrap up and present in an hour But I'll do the best that I can Every one of these subjects that I look at is weird in some way I will try to call out the ways in which they are weird as we go along It's also really really important when you're looking at these that 501 C3's are not the same as 501 C6's And I was just having a conversation with someone before we started if you are running a 501 C3 nonprofit There are extreme limitations on what you can do In response for a sponsorship, right? You can you can give very limited benefits as part of that sponsorship because it's not meant to be transactional So I can't give you free tickets to events or discounts to courses or a bunch of other things like that I could put your logo on a page and it's it's a it's about it If you're a 501 C6 you have a lot more freedom that you can give in exchange for those sponsorship benefits You see that reflected in price and you see that reflected in a number of ways So as this project continues and grows Be very mindful how you talk about data from 501 C6's versus 501 C3's And in some cases I had to extrapolate Information there might be a missing prospectus in the middle in particular with the Linux Foundation And I'll talk about that when I get to it I had to try to guess at some of the information and so Some of the stuff is is extrapolated but work in progress. I feel reasonably confident about some of it and Like I said, it's publicly available information. I have a reproducible methodology if it's wrong We get it more right over time So I'm gonna take a drink of water and we're gonna look at the Apache Software Foundation So these are the sponsorship levels for the Apache Software Foundation for 2023 And you'll see this common approach used in a lot of different foundations They have escalating levers levels of membership that cost increasingly more over time The big numbers if you look at it if I look at just the estimation of revenue from their sponsors pages That revenue is about 16.9 million dollars over the last ten years if we look at the 990s then the reported revenue Was about 14.4 million dollars now the 990s are much more likely to be accurate But they're also missing two years worth of data because the 990s lag by a couple of years I get all those from ProPublica. I should have added a link to that at the end of the presentation I'll update my slides Just looking at 2023 and just looking at the sponsors page on or around July 1st It looked like about 2.1 million dollars came in from sponsors for the Apache Software Foundation Top 10 sponsors of the Apache Software Foundation and then in this list here some names you recognize Some names you might not recognize some names. It might be surprising And you know at the end of the day, this is what the the Super powerful Google sheet, which is how I drive everything looks on the back end now I mentioned that there are some things that look weird for all of these all these projects This is the sponsorship levels. We see they're fairly stable going back to 2018 Apache doesn't change to change their prices very much over time if we go back further you'll see in 2014 They were a little bit less expensive But the things that make Apache weird one of them is this pineapple fund because they showed up as a top sponsor Every year for a number of years I had no idea who they were what they were until I went digging and they received what happened is the Apache Software Foundation Received a one million dollar Bitcoin donation that they draw on every year And it puts the pineapple fund as this fairly high-level sponsor in the Apache Software Foundation They show up nowhere else and in the analysis, right? It's just this fund that was created to hold the Bitcoin that was a donation of the Apache Software Foundation The other thing that's weird about the Apache Software Foundation is they have this interesting long tail Of people who have used the bronze level sponsorship to get SEO. Oh, that's not showing up. I wonder why There we are this interesting long tail of Sponsors who just bought some SEO maximization, right? So stags and hens seven jackpots website set up Dollarhand might be another one travel ticket hotels like these are all You know sites that purchased a sponsorship at the Apache Software Foundation for a couple thousand dollars because it increased their page rank in some way and The patchy is not the only foundation who's experienced this But I understand there has been some conversation about should they accept the money or not under these circumstances And consensus seems to be you know money's money. It's five thousand dollars the Apache Software Foundation. So who cares? Looking at the open-source initiative In 2023 their sponsorship levels range from about five hundred dollars if you're a community partner all the way up to a hundred thousand dollars If you're an anchor partner, which I don't believe they have any of currently Looking over ten years Looking at the sponsorship analysis We were able to account for around three million dollars worth of sponsors resonant revenue with about two point four million reported on the 990s Again, that's lagging by a couple of years in 2023 our analysis showed about three hundred and sixty six thousand dollars As the sponsors revenue for the open-source initiative They're top ten sponsors again some names here. You'll recognize between Google and IBM and Facebook and so on Craigslist charitable fund. This is the only place that they show up as a top sponsor But they do show up a couple of other places when we when we look at some of the other foundations And you know the same basic information on their sheet now one of the things that makes the OSI weird Is for a while they had these revenue-based Suggestions for how you should show up as a sponsor Which anecdotally we know no one actually followed right like you wrote a check to the OSI if you could if you could justify some funds for it But I know there were several organizations that made more than two hundred fifty million dollars It probably were not writing twenty thousand dollar checks and this in particular this revenue-based Suggesting or recommendation for sponsorship levels shifted a couple of times over the years And so there was also a big change between how they broke out their sponsorship levels between 2020 and 2021 When they enacted sort of a broader more well-defined structure for how these sponsors should be But you know when you're trying to reverse engineer this data and you see a sponsor show up at a certain level in the And the sponsor page and it's revenue-based you're kind of guessing right and this is one of those places where you have to extrapolate or guess at some data Looking at the Python software Foundation In 2023 we see their sponsorship level of range from about fifteen hundred dollars to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars with a very similar demarcations that you see in the open source initiative Looking over ten years worth of sponsors revenue I can account for about eight point three million dollars, but just looking at their nine nineties. There's about twenty one point seven million dollars There's a lot of revenue That is part of the Python software Foundation that cannot be accounted for just by applying this methodology And it could come from a variety of sources for 2023 just looking at sponsorship revenue We were able to account for about one point six million dollars Their top ten sponsors you see again a lot of the same names Bloomberg has been a pretty consistent heavy sponsor for the Python software Foundation Anything I'm gonna call it on here I think when we look at the the difference here on on column C between that twenty one point six million dollars and that eight point two Million dollars the wider that margin is the less confidence I have that the methodology is capturing everything that we're supposed to be capturing here And that'll come up again here later And we could also see in columns e1 and g1 the missing data from the nine nineties because they weren't filed at the time that we did this analysis Now there are several things that make the Python software Foundation new weird and PyCon is one of them a few years ago The Python software Foundation began bundling sponsorship of the PyCon event Into one whole package So if you show up as a as a $60,000 sponsor for the Python software Foundation you get certain benefits for For PyCon as well you get some tickets and some booth space and so on and so forth And this appears to be sort of a hack on the what can you do as a 501c3 that you can't do as a 501c6 In this case they have an event they can offer some specific benefits to the event So tying the two things together Provides them a different path to showing benefit to their sponsors That also means it's very difficult to apply this methodology and understand How the sponsorships end up working in practice And it means that when you look at the long tail of their sponsors list You have a lot of people who just want a booth at PyCon and they don't care about the rest of the stuff And so Python software Foundation has one of the longer lists of unique sponsors over the course of time It also doesn't account for this difficult to find piece of information That the PSF has a content delivery network donated by Fastly Which is millions of dollars a year in in kind donations, right? That's not going to show up on the sponsors page Fastly doesn't even show up on some of the years for sponsors pages But they consistently provide infrastructure to the Python software Foundation that Has has quite a high value and so This is another area where in kind donations if the sponsor decides they're going to recognize you at a certain level as a sponsor Because of in kind donations versus money we're having to infer some information from them There are also The sponsorship levels that have remained reasonably stable, but they did change back over time, but for a while How much a sponsorship cost kind of depended on how big your organization was and how big your organization is is even harder to figure out than how much revenue your organization generates because Revenue if it's a public company you can get that information from the SEC or Crunchbase how big you are You know you maybe maybe you can get that maybe you can't so in particular the earlier data for Python software Foundation I think is a little wibbly I'm going to take a drink before I go into the next foundation Of the data that I'm presenting today the Linux Foundation is the least complete But I'll present the best information that I can Just looking at sponsorship levels for 2023 This is how they broke down and we can already see there's some complexity in defining these sponsorship levels Because the silver levels membership in the Linux Foundation Ranges from five to twenty thousand depending on the size of your organization So it's another one of these places where you have to do some guesswork when you look at the sponsors page and say What do we think these silver members paid? I will also caveat this data by saying this only includes base LF membership it doesn't include include anything like the CNCF or The OBJS Foundation or any other many many umbrella foundations that are underneath the LF But that complicates things when we get into this number summary I didn't even put the ten years Estimated sponsors revenue because I'm still trying to figure that out for reasons that I'll talk about in a couple moments But just summing the 990s and excluding the last two years the sum total of the revenue reported on the 990s for the Linux Foundation It's 680 almost 681 million dollars and that number can sound deceptively scary and I'm not gonna say it's not a high number I'm not gonna say that's a not not a lot of money But I do think that this number does reflect all of the money that comes through the LF into those umbrella foundations Right, so this most likely accounts for CNCF funds for the last 10 years open JS funds for the last 10 years Like everything that comes through right? I'm gonna continue to iterate on this information, but just going off to the 990s. This is what was there the 2023 analysis, which I feel pretty good looking at the sponsors page for base membership of the LF Sponsor revenue generated about 23.4 23.8 23.9 million dollars The top 10 sponsors looks nothing like the rest of our sponsors pages, right? They are deeply embedded in Linux no pun intended but we don't see Fujitsu or or Qualcomm show up in many other spaces when we look across the analysis And you know as we look in particular on the left Fujitsu Intel Oracle Qualcomm And Hitachi have been sponsors the last 10 years at a pretty significant level Now there are I guess that there are many things that make this one weird and one of them is the methodology When going into the Internet archive when I was conducting this research Prior to this morning because when I tried it this morning, of course everything seemed to work fine There were so many logos on the sponsor page in the archives That I would try to load a version of the sponsors page and I would get rate limited by the Internet archive So I had to turn on a VPN and try to find another place There I tried downloading some of the archive data and looking at it for the last several years That all has been driven by a project called LF landscape Which has a YAML file which spreads out who all of the members are and so for the last few years At least I don't have to take the Internet archive approach to get a list of who was a member and at what level but Because I don't and I don't know if this was Fixed or or another error like just looking at the archive. I kept getting rate limited every time to try I might try to get the information So this analysis is going much slower than the others also like this is the the silver members page and By comparison like if I come over and I just want to go down and look these are just silver members in the LF From 2020 and I've done that for a few seconds now and I'm into the L's right, so there are more than a thousand Silver members and so when it comes to Tying these to each other and making sure that you have the right ones captured And maybe somebody shows up for you or not. It's just very dense information to try to get at So that that makes it a little bit difficult to get at sometimes Let's get back into presentation mode I Already mentioned like that number from the 990s almost certainly includes all the revenue that floats down through Into the other foundations So what I don't want is someone to walk out and say the Linux foundation budget for the last ten years has been $700 million. What did they do? Well a lot of that flew down to foundation projects And the question is much like much more complicated than like what does Jim do with $700 million, right? So I want us to be mindful how we talk about the the information as we talk about it And then we also talked about that That like some moving target with silver membership my approach to get to that $23 million for last year was to Just take the average take the median value between those two and say all the silver members probably paid about $12,500 and hope that it comes out of the wash Yeah, this is like this is based on I think the number of people in your organization, right? Oh There we are Thank you done This is you know, but you're supposed to pay a certain number for your silver membership based on how many people are in your Organization and for well-known companies, that's easy and for companies. I've never heard of they might still have more than 5,000 people I have no idea. It's like I said easy if you can get it from Crunchbase hard if you have to go get it from somewhere else Good question there was a question from the audience am I filtering for universities that might be affiliated I am not But I believe they would show up as associate members not silver members. Yeah, so So that's the four foundations and and sort of a look at that data I'm gonna check my time and dig into open source summit North America as the first event If anybody has a burning question, this is a natural pause point for me to take a question about the foundation data otherwise, I'm gonna like soldier forward so and On we go. All right open source summit North America last year sponsorship ranged from 8,000 to $70,000 depending on what level you wanted to show up Obviously, we don't have 990 data for open source summit North America It's probably data that will show up in the LF's base 990, but I'm not entirely sure how all of that works because there is a complex Network of foundations and programs that are involved there, but looking at 2023 It looks like the budget From sponsor revenue for open source summit North America was in the neighborhood of $972,000 now what I found interesting about this number is That when I talked to people who Talk about the Linux Foundation and have concerns about fundraising a lot of it seemed to be centered on events And how many events the LF is running based on this? I don't think that's where money comes from right and You know by comparison when I looked at silver membership That was about eight or nine million dollars worth of revenue that you could identify from sponsors So if we if we are concerned about the LF's role in large events I want to keep this number in mind because like then you have to take this and try to run You know multi-thousand person event in a particular location. So Top 10 sponsors of open source summit North America over the last 10 years Probably no surprises in here except I do have to admit that I occasionally scratch my head when I see the College of Computing Foundation sponsoring other Linux Foundation events. I don't get it But neither have I asked any questions about it. So that's on me Anything I want to call out from here not in particular, but again, this is just what the sheets look like on the on the back sign If we look at sponsorship levels, you know, they they bumped prices on the top level sponsorship a couple years ago They were pretty consistent for several years if you go back to 2014 Some of these sponsorships were a little bit less expensive But you tend to see sponsorship levels whether they're in events or foundations remain fairly flat they don't change very often And the other event I would look at it scale because we're here. It seems only fair Sponsorship levels at scale for for last year that's not include this year's information. I should inject here I Mentioned pulling this data as of July 1 that was for foundations for events I pulled the sponsor data as close to the day of the event as I could Because I assumed the day of the event is when the last minute sponsor is gonna come through and then nobody's gonna have time To update it during the event. So I it's not pinned to that July 1 date But these are the levels of sponsorship of the different things that you can sponsor for scale between 2000 and $12,500 Over the course of the last 10 years Sponsors revenue based on the website looks like it generated about 1.7 million dollars for scale And for 2023 it looked like they brought in about 318 thousand dollars for sponsors revenue If you look at the top 10 sponsors, I think Most people there are a number of people who would be surprised to see Microsoft at the top of this list, right? But this is the the list of the top 10 sponsors for scale again CNCF here I have fewer questions about CNCF sponsoring scale. It's just when it's sponsoring Linus Foundation events that I don't quite understand But if we look at the the numbers that companies have invested in In an event like scale, oh it didn't happen again, so I don't know why that keeps happening if we look at the numbers that companies have invested in an event like scale and Compare them to numbers that companies invest in an event like open source summit North America that you can't see It's literally in order to order a magnitude more money, right? Which I think is a testament to what the scale team can pull off With the small amount of funds that they do receive from sponsors and how heavily they depend on volunteer investment of time and labor and producing the event There are several things that make scale weird and the first one is actually super positive I emailed the scale team sometime last year and said hey I'm having trouble finding a couple of your sponsors perspective. Can you help me? And a lot of mail me 18 years worth of sponsorship perspectives so that I could just drop them right into Into the repo so that was fantastic, right? And I wanted to make sure that I called out a lot and the scale team and thank them for that And I think he was traveling at the time and he's like there's a couple. I can't find they're probably in deep art deep Archives, maybe scale 2 and 3 and like it's it's fine. I can I can work with this so that was great They also have All like there was some shifting Levels of sponsorship you see in 2018 We had a registration sponsor or a reception sponsor a special event or speaker track or media They have all these little level sponsorships that someone might show up for That make it very difficult to tie one level to another level over time It was sort of the most work to figure like what is it 2020 there was a network sponsor I don't think they appeared anywhere else, right? And so the the addition and subtraction of the small sponsorship levels made this one a little bit harder to pin down But all the information was there and they archived their site. Helpfully at scales So Southern Southern California Linux expo.org or com or whatever the actual domain is my browser history remembers it But it also means And this is from this year as an example You might have the CNCF show up as a platinum sponsor for the event, but also a travel sponsor And so like do I sum these how do I spreadsheet that out together? Because when sponsors are showing up in multiple places in the sponsors page if the entire methodology is Assumes that whatever it says in the prospectus is what you paid and that's where you showed up And suddenly now there's this one too many relationship that I didn't count for So scale also in its own way is weird Looking an aggregate and now this then a couple of charts We'll look at Across all the analysis I have done so far So it is the most data the data that is most in flight But if you look at where where dollars have flowed over the last ten years between the PSF numfocus SFC OSI I've actually software foundation the Linux foundation This is what that looks like in a in a handy little barish pious graph, right? If we look at where that money flows for events It looks a little more like this and we don't see the pictures again. I wish I knew that was why that was happening, right? I this will look different if there are more or more events And in particular the all things open data I had to do a lot of extrapolation from I had an early prospectus and a late prospectus They were pretty closely aligned But what the levels actually look like we're kind of difficult and I still have some Conversations that was taught about that data if we look at top sponsors across everything We see that Microsoft has been a pretty significant sponsor when you look at found By high dollar deep investment in base LF membership so that they could steer the board But you've got quite a wide range of sponsors here This chart I think is interesting if it shows up Because we have we have IBM trending along as a top sponsor and then there's this $500,000 drop that happens all of a sudden anybody know why You know why Because they acquired red hat and they both had $500,000 membership to Linux Foundation and IBM pulled back from there So the red hat can keep it, right? So when I was first trying to look at this data, I was like what happened and after it was red hat or it had to point It out to me I think it's really striking to look at this list of the top sponsors Versus the top sponsors of only LF stuff versus the top sponsors of non-LF stuff Because when I think about wanting folks to show up for a user-driven community focused events like scale The ones on the right are the ones that I will probably reach out to for money I'm less likely to unlock money from an Intel or a Fujitsu for something like scale But I think the this chart is very interesting when you when you kind of line them up next to each other And then filter out base level high dollar LF memberships because they skew the data so high Now there's an aspect of this that is going on in parallel Which is we're conducting some interviews with people who make funding decisions from within companies and organizations And it's early days on this yet, but you'll see more about this over the course of the year So I'm working with Julia Ferrioli and many of you will know her work from from her work in the ecosystem And to get where we are now she sat down with about six funders recorded 45 minutes interviews to do kind of a structured Q&A format Six lines of inquiry open-ended questions just sort of followed a discussion and then to draw out some observations from that so far They've all been people from for-profit companies with more than 200 people And they are all participants either are currently or have been previously involved making funding decisions So the early insights from some of those Were around the motivations like why is it that companies make these kind of funding decisions? Almost all of them said risk reduction was part of our calculus Which I have so much I could say about And I'm one of the the people who answered that question Benefits to brand is second influencing the direction of the technology maybe two-thirds of the people and there's always a We think there's always a recruitment angle for many of those people there was not a recruitment angle and then Inputs into the decision and you know largely dependent on do we have a dependency and did some employee? Put the project forward for something that we should be supporting But alignment with business calls was last on the list here Which tells you something about the thought process for people who make or who have made these kinds of funding decisions in the past Now next steps for this she has there we are Let's just lagging today She has additional schedule interview scheduled. She's got a formal research proposal that she's submitting for review She's gonna craft and release the survey and and hopes to produce a white paper like a formal research paper That has good science back to some of this as opposed to Dwayne the non-dataist non-scientist not economist standing up here telling you what he thinks he sees So stay tuned for that over the course of the year as Julia will continue to work on that It's all gonna come from the same place under the focused project I Want to take the opportunity to show some charts that go up into the right Because there's a different conversation I want to plug in to this broader discussion that I hope that we're having This is wages in the United States from 2007 to 2022 Yesterday the Washington Post Helpfully produced an article that said 11 charts that show you how COVID changed the economy and we see consumer price index for Food going up into the right We see gas going up into the right We see housing prices going up into the right We see credit card debt going up into the right So when we talk about foundations and events that aren't generally changing their sponsorship levels over time they they they they still have Significant expenses that they have to account for right and so one of the things that I want us to do as we think about how we want to fund these organizations is Remember that our organizations might have profit that's going up into the right We also might have expenses going up to the right But if we keep our investments in these foundations and events flat That's making the problem worse for them because I don't know a single foundation or a single event That is diligently trying to do less year over year than they were the year before All right, if you were to look at in particular numb focus the project that they've taken on over the last ten years By comparison to how they've kept their budget Or the OSI in particular in the works They've tried to do over the last ten years versus the relatively flat budget like that's something that we need to be factoring into our Into our thinking When we look at the total revenue just from 990s We have to take the LF out of this Discussion in order to even be able to see the changes in these other foundations that I've talked about All right And I mentioned before that I want to steer us toward a discussion around accountability Accountability both for our companies and how are we investing in open source relative to the profits that our companies are making But also are we doing this mindfully? Are we doing this on purpose? Are we investing in foundations though? We mean to be so that we can ensure that organizations like the OSI Who's trying really really hard to help us steer toward an open source definition of AI on less money than everyone else in the equation? Like these are conversations that I want us to have Don go ahead Do I know what happened with numb focus from 2014? Oh, that's conservancy. That's numb focus Do I know what happened with them in 2018? For the for the large jump in revenue not off the top of my head I do know that some of these organizations As they've taken on additional projects have been able to get support from foundations like Sloan and Ford and others to do some of that work But some of them can't and in particular numb focuses of C3 They can take money from C3's right, but it can't leave that ecosystem if you're a C6 you can't take money from a C3 Yeah, it's a significant jump I if I'm able to at the end Off-camera, so I don't Misrepresent anything I'll pull up the actual sheet for numb focus and show you and we can dig into and see if there's anything in particular that we see there Now I mentioned In the talk description that I would provide some actionable recommendations for folks And then I remembered to put them in at the last minute so that I could actually give something that you can do with this information Because so far what we've got is huh interesting Thanks, thanks for the information. I don't know what to do with it So I want to focus first on sponsors right if you are someone who makes funding decisions for your organization I really want to encourage you to step back and think about the whole picture the entire picture Your events team Internally or other lines of business internally might also be participating in funding activities And if you aren't talking to each other You don't have a whole view of the role that your company is playing and engaging in these sponsorship engagements And I mentioned earlier, but it's really really important that we factor rising costs for everyone else into these sponsorships Because the cost of labor is not going down for for conservancy or for the OSI or or for the Linux Foundation Right, but if they're keeping their sponsorship levels flat that means they either have to hustle for more sponsors Or get you to show up in some other way And so when you're doing budgetary planning, you will get pressure Natural healthy pressure from the business to keep your costs flat But you have to factor some of this stuff in into your thinking anyway And I want to encourage people to push for budget growth in their sponsorship budgets that it takes these rising costs into account and then The typo there, but I would you like once or twice a year take everything that you know that your company is Investing on when it comes to open source your sponsorships your events your direct investments in projects or people Spread it all out on the table Categorize it break it into 501 C3's and C6's break it into technology domains or language domains or ecosystems Look for many different ways to break it up and see if it makes sense See if you're doing the things that you mean to be doing or if you're having some unexpected Unintended consequences as a result of the the decisions that you're making That you that you haven't seen Now for sponsors, I think it's important if you work in a foundation if you work for project and you're experiencing higher costs If you're trying to be just like a team player and not make trouble and not like alert your sponsors They can't help you right so I really want to encourage you to be to be public with people about if you if you have to pay your staff More because they need more money to buy food and that's causing your staff budget to go up Make sure the community knows that that's a pain that you're feeling and one of the ways that you can communicate that is by Intentionally adjusting whatever your sponsorship levels need to be in order to make sure that you're running your business or your foundation effectively But don't sit on that information make sure the community has it because it's the only way we know as a community to help show up for you I also and like No shade on on scale here, but Simplify your sponsor sponsorship options, right? Like I don't know that that any organization needs five or five or more individual sponsorship levels that are all two thousand dollars Call it one thing and move on right because it's fewer things for you to need to track And it's fewer things as a sponsor if I show up if I have 40 options that I can select from I'm gonna Take longer to make my decision I'm probably gonna try to get you to put together a custom package in any way because I oh like I can can I get that But with this and I can I take out the booth and I can put this over there Like give me three things I can choose from and and make me move on right? I think a lot of sponsors would be happy to Write a check get the most important perks to them walk away from a few of them and that's okay, right? So simplifying your sponsorship options I think both helps you operationally, but it helps sponsors make make quicker decisions better decisions And lastly really be careful who you use for comparison I sort of bundled this all up under resist reactive changes, right? Like if you if you see another organization that's fundraising. Well, and you and you try to compete on the same terms as that organization You're setting yourself up for fail like it's much more important that you understand what your needs as are as an organization and that you've put together a Strategy for how you want to raise these funds and how you want to go after these funds that meets your needs Don't get wound up by what other people are doing There was another thing I wanted to say about reactive changes here, but really is When I talk to leaders and nonprofits many of them are Talking to me coming from one meeting on their way to another meeting for 10 hours a day, right? Like they're busy busy folks And so sometimes it's very difficult to do much more than then just react to things as they're coming in But I want to I want to challenge sponsors to resist those changes that are that are more reactive in nature As far as this project goes what's coming next I want to put a couple plugs in here I facilitate a working group every other Tuesday for decision-makers in the FOS ecosystem particularly for people who work in companies who are trying to drive money into the open source ecosystem and Want or to develop or understand frameworks for how to do that Some of this is based off of the work that I did at indeed when I built the FOS contributor fund and sort of pushed that pattern out to other folks But that's not the only group of people that are there And we come together to try to iterate on and produce frameworks that we can use and share with each other For how to what would you do if someone said we got five hundred thousand dollars that we have to spend by the end of The year we wanted to go to open source go right like we want to give people frameworks to mobilize that money quickly and effectively And to show impact to their business for doing it. So there's a working group If you go to FOS funders comm you'll find information I apologize if you've already gone there and said I want to join the working group and I haven't gotten back to you because I Do have a lot going on but I will get back to you and there are other people there at the FOS funders as well There's also a slack channel on the to-do group slack for some of us who talk about this subject. I Want to give a plug to Shane whose name I have never heard pronounced out loud. Does anyone know how to say it? saying Kirkaroo Long time apache software person Shane I hope you're not watching I hope you are watching this and I hope you have grace for me not knowing how to pronounce your name Because I've only ever seen it written and I saw it many times on Twitter Shane is doing an interesting line of investigation around FOS foundations as well pulling together different sponsorship models And pulling together together a different foundation metadata for some of these foundations There's some overlap But not very much between the work that he and I are doing one of the things that he's doing that I think is interesting is he's trying to come up with a unified way to talk about these different tiers of sponsorships and kind of what people's Sponsorship foundation models are if he hasn't found out already as I will have already found out It's complicated and hard and you're comparing a bunch of fruit that doesn't look like each other when you're looking at these foundations But definitely worth going and checking out his work there Just before I walked into the talk because someone's gonna say where can I see the data? You can see the very very very first piece of data That I pushed up into the folks to sponsorship data github repo Just before I walked into the meeting like I'm not a dataist It's a CSV dump of the two tables that I have for scale, right? It is the worst way to produce this data For people to do something with but I don't know the best way yet And so I thought I would start here if you're interested in getting involved in the project open an issue on the project And we'll pick up from there It is in fact public but not private like it is on the screen because just before I came up I said wait a minute that's private not public, but I took the screenshot before that so yes It is public I think good call-out Lance Before I take questions I have eight whole stickers For jumpsuit wizard I think they're pretty cool they glow in the dark if you'll actually put it on something Please do come get one and with that You all ask good questions. You've been a great audience and that's what I appreciate it's about you And I will take questions in the time that we have left. Thank you I'm gonna run a microphone down so that the people on The video oh, thank you Stephanie so that the people on video can hear your question. Thank you Mostly want you to go back to the slide, but is there any more detail about? The point on risk reduction that Julie was was Julie or Julia Julia Julie. Sorry. I hope she's watching it doesn't Julie Risk reduction. Yeah, so Most companies most funders that I know of if you ask them Why are you investing in open source? Whether it's a foundation or if it's a specifically a project? It's because they want the project to be healthy Right and so a company might recognize that they might have an outsize dependency on a particular piece of software and They may not have immediate muscle inside the company to get involved in the project But giving money is one way they can Attempt to reduce the risk of that project going under just by making sure the maintainer has access to funds That's generally what that question means cool What else it seemed like Everything you were citing was well, it was very us focused is that intentional was that just a practical question? Repeating the question for For the audience just in case the mic didn't pick up It seems like much of the data is us focused because much of the data is us focused Not all of the foundations are us based but the biggest ones that I was dealing with and the ones that I started with were us based I think if you look at If you look across like the get-up sponsors ecosystem the open collectives ecosystem the dollars bias in the direction of the US There's There's not it like an intentional choice here to skew things out But there are almost certainly foundations that I just haven't gotten to yet as part of the research So is there someone that sticks out in particular to you that's missing? Yeah, yeah, no, that's fine The answer was you know, he was aware of SFS free software foundation Europe and the eclipse foundation I actually started on the eclipse foundation and the eclipse foundation made the Python software foundation evaluation Looked really really easy because the membership model for the eclipse foundation versus the sponsorship model for the eclipse foundation Doesn't line up to the original methodology very well, and I haven't figured out what to do with it. So It's in the queue I guess is what I would say so it's a good call out I'm not sure if you covered this before I walked in So, how do I approach? Who do I approach in a company or how do I find these companies that are interested in helping support a project? You still at the open source lab at Oregon State, right? So the question was from from lands at the outsourced lab at Oregon State University and How do you ask companies for money is sort of the end of it The first piece of advice I always give to anyone Is to get to the the how much and when as quickly as possible? Because the two things I need to know if I'm a funder are do I have the signing authority and is it in my budget in this quarter? Right because if I don't have those pieces of information, I can't help so I will often be approached by Projects or events or foundations that say we need money. I'm like cool. I don't know what to do with that Like it's almost like give me feedback like I use that's a vet It's a hard question to answer even for your friends, right? Because if you ask your friends for feedback, they're gonna say I liked it So if you get to the how much and when as quickly as possible that that will shortcut some of the immediate like the nose Or the I can't talk about this right now parts of the conversation and get to that quickly for most come like It's helpful to think about Like how you want them to think about the money, right? If this is a I give this is a straight-up philanthropic charitable angle And you're going to a company that does not take a philanthropy charitable mindset to these kinds of investments You're unlikely to get success, right? You know Bloomberg philanthropies would be like a good path to go for some of those funds But you're gonna have a more difficult time getting money out of Wells Fargo because it's the right thing to do And I'm not picking on Wells Fargo. I just named a bank, right? and so if if if it's not Philanthropy then there's going to have to be some kind of clear benefit to the organization and some kind of impact back to the organization For them to be able to wrap their heads around why I in particular and investing this money in the open source foundation or project or or so on and so forth, right and so looking for the story there that you can tell and Your numbers don't have to be Incredible they can be cocktail napkin math worth of numbers But they have to make sense and they have to tell a story to the person that you're asking for money Because if you don't have any kind of story, then it'll be very difficult. It's the best pieces of advice I have off the top of my head What else I have a question to the mic to actually one is we were talking about the 6c versus 3c why what's the benefit of for for Foundations to do one or the other with one question and also are you looking at any of the? The foundation to foundation so I'm thinking of Sloan because that's one of our big funders Right, but whether there's been an uptick in that type of and your DIF is another one I mean what this is based on have you seen an uptick in that and recently and have you any ideas about why that suddenly went up Yeah, so the question of like why an organization might peak pick c3 versus c6 is very Personal one comes down to the to the foundation itself. I have heard From more than one person and this is anecdotal not even anecdata at this point That they find it easier to get to unlock funding from companies if they are a c6 because the Exchange can be more transactional in nature. You can actually show more that you're giving for it as opposed to telling an impact story If you're a c3 Whereas c3's The ones that I talked to they tend to be more mission aligned And and less concerned about the transactional nature of those those kinds of exchanges And your second question was Am I doing any work to look at foundation the flow of foundation to foundation funding not currently? The deeper I get into the investigation Eventually this was funded research from the the the round. It's late Right at this point like I'm still working my way through the investigation But the critical digital infrastructure fund has now been rebranded the digital Infrastructure insights fund and they're doing subsequent rounds of funding for new projects Highly recommend if you have an interesting area to dig in that you look at their call for proposals They're gonna do an RFP Later this year for another round. They just finished one and just funded a bunch of stuff earlier and so At a certain point I'll hit the limit of what I've been able to investigate with the funds that I have available And then we'll see what we do Any other questions? Mary you want me to start over? All right a couple of things here at the end some links These are also gonna be in the side deck that is already up on scale Like I said a particular call out for the digital infrastructure insights fund If you have interesting work that you want to see funded go look for their RFP come talk to me If you want to know more and how about the work that we're doing Thanks all for your attention. Thanks for sticking around at the end of scale, and I hope you all travel home safely