Welcome to the FOSS Foundations Metadata directory! We are eager to collaborate with academic researchers and open source practitioners alike on curating rich metadata about the many excellent non-profit Foundations that either host or help open source projects succeed.
- Access the directory of foundation metadata, plus related models and data:
- Sponsorship program models
- Tax data on US nonprofit foundations
- Project entities that aren’t legal organizations (limited dataset)
- Projects hosted at foundations (limited dataset)
- Read the roadmap to see where we’re headed and OpenAPI plans.
- See the starting philosophy around data design.
- Find useful resources to learn about FOSS Foundations.
- See research ideas and links about this dataset.
- Learn how to contribute to this site.
- Be nice and respect our Code of Conduct.
- We can help you Choose A Foundation for your project to join.
- Your current host, Shane Curcuru is looking for co-maintainers!
Goals
- Create a rich metadata directory about nonprofit open source supporting organizations, including financial, sponsorship, governance, and other metadata.
- Store data in easy-to-update formats, and provide reliable, faceted, and discoverable access.
- Keep the site and tooling as zero/low maintenance as practical.
- Have a simple PR-driven data submission process that prevents errors.
- Attract multiple contributors to create community governance.
- Build a resource for the FOSS ecosystem that will last for 50+ years.
Non-Goals
Volunteers are welcomed to help turn non-goals into goals, if there is interest and energy to build them!
- Tracking commercial entities.
- Tracking non-open source or free software related entities.
- Tracking non-entity projects; i.e. open source projects without legal entities.
- Fancy features, UI, or hard to maintain visualizations. We provide a data store that others can repurpose.
Data
Read more about our data philosophy.
- Store structured metadata about Foundations in _foundations/asf.md frontmatter, parseable as YAML/JSON.
- One file per foundation makes PRs simple to manage and associate with a responsible contributor.
- Frontmatter metadata can be exposed by OpenAPI for programmatic access.
- Jekyll turns foundation data and Markdown bodies to human-readable websites automatically.
- OpenAPI and GitHub Actions tooling provides linting to keep data formats clean.
- Using flat files and GitHub Pages means zero maintenance.
- Markdown body can be used for additional, unstructured data or descriptions.
- Use common human-findable identifier strings to tie in sponsorship and other models.
- Create good-enough data structures that can be used by practitioners and academics alike.
Research
We are looking for research collaborations, both to validate that the metadata we’re tracking is valuable to researchers, and to seek help in expanding our datasets. Many of the research topics related to this site will result in new paper topics, as well as impactful results for the communities you’re studying.