Draft!

CivicForge Mission Statment

Vision (what do we want to do?)

The open source community at large is in need of an organizing body to facilitate the collection and allocation of resources required for the processes inherit in developing full-on, legally established open source initiatives. Since the needs are fairly consistent from one project to the next and these needs happen sporadically as projects follow the open source development lifecycle, it makes sense to create an umbrella entity to handle the fiscal and legal aspects of this process for projects in need of this kind of help who also meet certain predetermined criteria.

As a corollary of this work, there is an opportunity to present and market the open source model as a political and socioeconomic model for organizing work, cultural participation and education. Such a foundation would be tasked with providing thought leadership towards spreading and promoting open source in cultural, academic and corporate institutions around the world. As open source development has primarily focused on software, it is now becoming the dominant organizing model for online grassroots participatory social networks and microeconomies.

The foundation would be thus tasked with not only furnishing the open source community with tools for existing and participating in the traditional offline world, but would also be charged with promoting and enabling the advancement of these projects to reap the greatest societal return on participation.

Purpose (why are we doing this?)

We are doing this to:

• enable developers and builders of open source initiatives to focus on their primary work and accomplish their goals
• minimize the costs of becoming a legally established entity
• minimize the total amount of legal and financial people resources necessary for the open source community to be successful and to complete with proprietary counterparts
• educate the world about open source as more than a software development methodology
• promote open source work as a viable economic model for producing high value, high quality work using a participatory, meritocratic model
• make open source development efforts potentially more efficient at self-organizing and self-actualization (becoming autonomous and maintaining good community manners)

Objectives (how will we achieve our purpose?)

We will achieve our purposes by:

• Seeking and providing various back-office services to open source initiatives
• Organizing legal and financial resources for open source initiatives
• Building tools that help people coordinate, promote, discuss, market and participate in open source initiatives
• Establishing a social network that initiatives can tap into to find and recruit talent
• Developing relationships with academic, business, open source foundations, and other strategic partners
• Communicating our services, ideas, beliefs, tactics and strategies to our community, the media and the public beyond
• Developing a compelling and consistent narrative/"the story of open source"

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