[IAEP] Color of Money

[David Farning]

During the preparations and discussions at SugarCamp Paris, it became
obvious that money is going to play a more significant role in Sugar
Labs in the future.  If Sugar Labs does not handle cash directly, we
will certainly have friends and partners who do.

How to raise money? How spend money? How to use the money to
strengthen rather than fracture the community that we have been build
for the last twelve months.

The most important point is to realize the the 'role' money plays in Sugar Labs.

In a For-Profit business, the goal, or mission, of the organization is
to make money.  The board of directors has a legal responsibility to
shareholders to make money.  The business units; manufacturing,
research and development, sales, marketing all exist to support goal
of making money.

Sugar Labs, on the other hand, has the missions of creating the Sugar
Learning Platform and developing the Sugar ecosystem.  Every team
exists to support those goals.  The Sugar Labs Oversight board,
elected by the Sugar Labs members, has the legal and moral obligation
of supporting the Sugar Labs missions.

There are a couple of steps which successful open source projects have
used to make this work.

1.  Separate project and platform decisions.
2.  Establish consistent and transparent relationships.
3.  Create value in the ecosystem to support development and support.
4.  Learn from mistakes and move on.

Separate project and platform decisions.

For example the Mozilla project is composed of two different
organizations;  Mozilla.org and Mozilla Corp.  Mozilla.org is the
community based organization which retains control of the technical
decision and direction on the Firefox platforms.  Mozilla.org licenses
the Mozilla trademarks to Mozilla corp to _support_ the development
project.  If, at any time, Mozilla.org decides that Mozilla Corp is
not acting in the best interest of the org, they can cancel the
licensing agreements.

Gnome goes even further.  The Gnome foundation is specifically
restricted from making technical decisions which affect the direction
of the platform.

While it is too early in the Sugar Labs life cycle to start forming
additional organizational layers.  We can follow the example of the
Apache foundation and simply make it clear that financial decisions
are separate from technical or educational decisions.

A cautionary tale can be seen in Open Office.  A disproportionally
large percent of both the project and technical leaderships comes from
Sun.  As a result, technical decisions are based on internal Sun
politics rather than technical validity.

Establish consistent and transparent relationships.

Sugar Labs must create methods for establishing and fostering
relationships in a open and consistent manner.  The goal is that Sugar
Labs can accept contributions and support from anyone without fear of
unspoken agreements or understandings.  How the contributions are used
and applied is up to the community.  This model can work very well.
As a informal example, the Apache Foundation is able to accept
$100,000 per year from Microsoft without compromising their mission,
vision or values.

Gnome is slight slightly more formal.  Corporate contributors are
invited to sit on an advisory board.  The advisory board meets
regularly with the Executive director. As a result, the donors voices
are heard.  The eclipse process is similar, yet more formal.

Create value in the ecosystem to support development and support.

A large part of the value of collaborative platforms is derived from
the network effect.  The value of the network grows faster than the
number of included nodes.

No company has created a early childhood learning platform because the
risk is not worth the reward for any individual company.  By
positioning Sugar labs as a point of collaboration for anyone
interested in providing a complementary good or service to Sugar,
Sugar Labs can reduce the risk carried by any individual organization.

Learn from mistakes and move on

The final point is too learn from our mistakes and move on.  Sugar
Labs is going to make mistakes and probably a lot of them.  But, by
admitting our mistakes, and fixing them, we can generate trust from
our partners and users.

david