Welcome to the FOSS Foundations Metadata directory! We are eager to collaborate with academic researchers and open source practitioners alike on curating rich common metadata about the many excellent non-profit Foundations that either host or help open source projects succeed.
- Discover the directory of foundation metadata.
- Read the roadmap to see where we’re headed.
- See the starting philosophy around data design.
- Find useful resources to learn about FOSS Foundations.
- 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.
- Learn about your current host, Shane Curcuru.
Goals
- Create a rich metadata directory about nonprofit open source organizations.
- Data is easy to consume in multiple ways that are reliable.
- Website and any tooling are zero/low maintenance.
- Build simple PR-driven data submission that prevents errors.
- Attract multiple contributors that create community governance.
Non-Goals
- Tracking commercial entities.
- Tracking non-entity projects; i.e. open source projects without legal entities.
- Fancy features, UI, or hard to maintain visualizations.
- Volunteers are welcomed to help turn non-goals into goals!
Data
Read more about our data philosophy.
- Store basic metadata in _foundations/asf.md frontmatter, parseable as YAML
- Individual files makes PRs very simple and limited to the organization you’re updating
- Most data fields are purely optional, since we rely on volunteers to research data
- Store unstructured data as the body of the .md documents, meaning they can be self-describing
- Workflow expects to maintain _foundations files, and then use Actions to auto-build alternate data formats
- Using flat files / GitHub Pages means zero maintenance
- Will store a subset of metadata for commercial organizations and independent projects
- People searching for a project will see if it’s a non-profit (in main data source) or not