An interesting post came up in my Twitter feed today that is related to this thread about starting a PureScript fund: https://nadiaeghbal.com/foundations
I summarized the important points below. The only effect it has on the thread thus far is that it re-inforces the idea that project governance should be far apart from funding and funding governance.
Note that I think “governance” in the article conflates governance of the project’s funds with the governance of the project’s maintenance and direction, so take care of that detail when reading. In this post, I didn’t hear any opinions about a fund’s governance, but only a project’s governance. I think a fund needs some form of transparency and governance, so this post doesn’t affect our thread’s opinions on a potential PureScript fund’s scope/charter.
– Foundations as a service provider –
“I also don’t think it’s necessary for a project to start its own 501© to handle these tasks. It’s more efficient for these services to be “virtualized” by a few providers, who lower coordination costs for everyone.” This is what OpenCollective offers a project like PureScript.
“Eventually, services like Patreon might make it easier to fund contributors in a highly visible way [as opposed to funding a central project itself]. … It’s worth imagining a world where we don’t need to associate a legal entity with the project at all.” This is a reference to a project’s contributors being funded rather than the project’s foundation/governor.
– Foundations as a governance tool –
“If a project is wildly successful, it’s rare that it will continue to grow without any governance conflicts. …software foundations became the standard response to these issues [of corporate influence].”
“In either case, (leaning into or away from corporate ownership) we’ve managed to formalize one or two points of failure for “the project” , which is otherwise inherently distributed. … But just as “the government” is not “the people”, but rather a representative body whose legitimacy derives from sustained popular support, “the foundation” is not “the project”, and should not be treated as such.”
I believe we can infer from this that the author’s opinion is that a foundation should not be responsible for the governance & direction of the project. Instead, the project should have a group/process which is separate from the foundation who is responsible for governance.
– A distributed, not oligarchic, system –
“Although the common approach (in a project’s early days of growth) is to create a foundation to hold these assets, I’d like to suggest two alternatives: 1) Entity(0) holds the assets and uses them to drive early adoption and development, 2) Funds are distributed to major or strategically desirable contributors, who help drive adoption and development.”
“The medium-to-long term goal, however, is to distribute the opportunity for contribution across multiple locations (or maintainers). I emphasize “opportunity” because I think it’s conceivable that Entity(0) continues to be the only major actor, if they earn and maintain the trust of their community. But the community (i.e. “the project” ) should be able to eject or impeach them if they fail to do a good job. … Successful open source projects should exist beyond the control of any one company or foundation.”
A final note from the author about governance (of the project’s maintenance and direction):
“…when does a project even need to formalize its governance? I have a pet theory…that projects only need to define governance at the first sign of conflict. … In theory, if you scaled to thousands of happy contributors and millions of happy users without anybody raising concerns about who’s running the thing, I’m not sure why you really need to define anything.”
That’s an interesting thought, but I would prefer to have a well-defined open governance model, as it is more empowering to contributors and potential maintainers.
