Organizational Structure and Governance of OSArch

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  • In the interests of transparency, we were recently approached by a charity fund who wanted to donate 1,000USD to the BlenderBIM Add-on. However, they had a specific requirement: the receiving organisation had to be a 501(c), and they had to transfer it before the end of 2020. For these two reasons, Thomas and I quickly set up an OpenCollective account (which is 501(c), and offers automatic approval based on Github stars). We successfully received the 1,000USD (with a 10% fee): https://opencollective.com/opensourcebim

    This was literally set up to meet this one particular scenario, so nothing is set it stone just yet.

    theoryshawJesusbillduncanpaulleebitacovirkaiaurelienzh
  • @Moult said:
    In the interests of transparency, we were recently approached by a charity fund who wanted to donate 1,000USD to the BlenderBIM Add-on.

    Well, one thing is clear. There won't be much problems to get some money in the future. People are so interested in an open source solution in AEC, that they don't have problem on bringing money on the table for early projects, even with informal organization. :)

    carlopav
  • Hello all,

    For Horizon 2021, clear research and/or innovation targets are needed, and in many cases 3 different entities in three different countries to collaborate. There are of course other research funding possibilities, but the field is so vast, it would need a lot of focus and coordination to have a successful bid in.

  • edited January 2021

    @ar_lav sure, it's not easy. But then it doesn't have to be us who get the money. We can just help groups find each other who have the same goals as us. For example, buildingSMART Denmark, Danish Facility Management Association & Danish Association of Housing Cooperatives. Great project possibilities for strengthening OpenBIM in FM... (that's not a totally off the top of my head suggestion)

    @bitacovir I just spoke to someone that some years ago had their installer open paypal donation dialogue. They had to shut it down because they couldn't use all the money EUR30.000 ... they're still using that money many years later.

  • edited January 2021

    @duncan , regarding funding sources in Norway, believe Statsbygg is a good prospect. Statsbygg is the Norwegian government’s building commissioner, property manager and developer. They also advise the government in construction and property affairs.

    Another probable source, Forsvarsbygg NDEA. The Norwegian Defence Estates Agency is a government administrative agency under the Ministry of Defence. They develop, build, operate and divest real estate for the defence sector.

    Yet another, OBOS.
    Norway’s largest housing developer. OBOS’ vision is to build the society of the future and, in doing so, fulfil housing dreams.

  • @CadGiru i guess they fall under the banner of 'partnering'. I've spoken to @condur about his as he has contacts inside Statsbygg. I think definitely there are possibilities there for partnering. What kind of collaboration do you think there could be?

  • I've been thinking a bit about the structure of our organization. I'm thinking that a way to do it would be to have three aspects:

    • Individual members
    • Corporate members
    • Project members

    Individual members could be anyone willing to put their name to some kind of charter
    Corporate members could be the same but with a tiered economic contribution
    Project members could be software projects who have fulfilled some requirements and are 'approved' in some way as being healthy, mature and high quality projects.

    There should of course also be some kind of incubator for projects that are looking promising and want to be active in our community.

    OSGeo has some interesting resources and requirements about having a healthy community around a project: https://www.osgeo.org/about/committees/incubation/

    Drawing from these ideas I think it would be great if we began talking with and about project and companies who want to be founding members. Together with them we could begin making a corporate charter.
    Potential corporate members:

    Potential project members. Together with them we could begin making a project charter.

    • LibreCAD
    • Blender (with specific Add-ons)
    • Speckle
    • Sverchok
    • Topologic
    • IfcOpenShell
    • Code_Aster

    Potential incubator projects

    • FreeCAD
    • BlenderBIM Add.on
    • ... many others

    ... you get the idea, let's not get sidetracked by discussing who should and shouldn't be on that list. My point is that in this way we can start with a strong but realistic base.

    Thoughts?

    basweinMoultJesusbillJQL
  • A thought that came to me during today's meetup, but not fast enough for me to mention it, is a way to use LibrePay by having developers for different Floss projects signed up on an OSArch team on LibrePay so any payment made to that team account is divided up equally between all members. OSArch could have a process for voting projects / developers to join the team. So if the team account gets $300 each month and there are 10 members, each member will get $30 each month. Of course there will be conditions for being nominated / voted to join the OSArch Dev team (project must be FLOSS, must be relevant to OSArch objectives, must be actively under development - publicly accessible repo with minimum of 6 months of active and current updates, etc). The nomination / voting process just becomes one of the ways of participating in OSArch, just like the voting process we've had for logos, and also a way of appreciating developers who are contributing useful tools to the ecosystem. Long term, it can help drive OSArch tools for interoperability between FlOSS BIM tools.

  • I like that idea.
    I would, however, avoid disturbing equally among the team. As is typical in an OS project, contributions usually following some type of long tail distribution. That is, only a few people contribute the most, whereby a large swath of people submit less.
    In this light, I would suggest disturbing funds based on merit, whereby merit is determined by community vote.
    I would even say, community vote is weighted. That is, some members have a higher voting potency than others.
    Voting potency could be determined quarterly or bi-yearly, whereby we have elections in which all the electorate's vote is weighted equally.
    2 cents.

  • Not sure about Blender or Speckle - they probably already busy with all the resources they have and are doing good work.

  • On the long tail issue, my thinking is that we have one key developer for each of the different projects that interest OSArch voted to the team. The team can be re-composed every 12 months, so projects that stopped being actively developed in the previous cycle of 12 months can get offloaded during the next voting round for example.

    "Team" in this instance by the way, refers to the LiberaPay 's Teams feature which does have some limitations.

    On voting, I do think each vote should have the same weight, but maybe with pre qualification requirements for a member to be able to vote to prevent a swarm of new memberships just to get a project voted. Either that, or there is a nomination process that is not through voting, so each project / developer put forward for voting has already gone through pre-qualification and is already fit enough for OSArch support anyway.

    Thinking about it again however, the idea of voting for projects for OSArch to support for each year does not have to be tied to LiberaPay, so I guess my little brain wave yesterday does not bring much that's new to the table!

  • @duncan said:
    I've been thinking a bit about the structure of our organization. I'm thinking that a way to do it would be to have three aspects:

    • Individual members
    • Corporate members
    • Project members

    Great idea.
    I tried to make a couple of suggestions but each time went back to read and saw you had those things covered already, this has good legs.

    duncanJesusbill
  • As much as possible shall we keep discussions on structure and organization in the other thread https://community.osarch.org/discussion/182/organizational-structure-and-governance-of-osarch ... and focus this thread on funding sources

  • edited January 2021

    @duncan I also think that your proposal is very solid and I am in favour.
    And as Aether Engineering we are happy to be in the founding corporate members with a reasonable economic contribution. We are heavy users of open-source tools so we will have only benefits from any actions that accelerate and facilitate their development. We are also planning to have code contributions and possibly some internal funding to spend for specific open-source developments that will serve for our internal workflows
    Edit: OSArch should be able to provide an invoice/receipt for "tax exemption" reasons

    JanF
  • edited January 2021

    stumbled on this.

    @Moult said:
    Right now, IfcOpenShell has a bus factor of 1-2. The BlenderBIM Add-on has a bus factor of 1. FreeCAD is much more mature, having a bus factor of maybe 15 (guessing here - could be totally wrong - in the past month, 23 authors contributed, but not all authors are core devs).

    unfortunatly I need to correct the bus factor of FreeCAD. There are dozens of developers and even a few core developers, but only one of the main developer is capable of doing merges in the core system of FreeCAD including all the circumstances which have to be taken into account on such a merge. All others do not have the overview about the whole story of FreeCAD core system. May be if we would count all other cores and main dev together they could count as just another 1. Means we have a bus factor of 1-2 in FreeCAD too. That is one of the main reason we have not seen a 0.19 release so far.
    bernd

    Just to write some good news too. The bus factor of bimtster has been rised about 100% from 1 to 2 :-)

    JesusbillduncanMoult
  • Per Open Collective's acceptance criteria here, it doesn't necessary seem like you need 100stars on a repo. There's other measures, it seems, they accept applications. Some of which we already possess.
    Regardless, I'm going try a social media campaign to try and get 100stars on the following gitlab repo.
    https://gitlab.com/osarch/FreeMVD_WorkFlow
    If you can, please stop by and star the repo.
    Thanks Much, Ryan

    Moult
  • Freecad may be a good one with more than 8.5k stars

  • Freecad could gain acceptance, but not OSArch.

  • Thank everyone for this excellent discussion!
    Great to hear about all your thoughts/ideas regarding Open Source BIM Developments/OSArch. Hereby a summary of my considerations/thoughts/ideas/plans regarding this subject. Looking forward to a discussion about this!

    1. A global legal entity for OSArch would be very good idea! A **Foundation **by example.

    2. IMHO Local Chapters would be perfect! So they have a certain authority when starting activity like fundraising campaigns or meetings.

    3. The position and the importance of the OS Developers should be a very important key pillar in the organisation.

    4. The board of the foundation should not take a very strong position regarding the direction of the development of the OS BIM software. It's better if that stays within the OS-community.

    5. They should facilitate the following things:
      a. Financial support for the development of OS BIM.
      b. Support documentation, tutorials, library creations, know how.

    6. There should also be a Committee of Recommendation with developers from the OS Community.
      a. Members of this committee will give recommendations for who of the OS Developers will be financially supported

    7. Financial support to developers should be for a period of at least 12 months. 4 months before the end of the 12 months a decision is made regarding for extension of the support. There should be no requirements to the financial support so that the developers will stay free in what they do. They can decide by themselves which direction they will go.

    8. The foundation can also employ developers on the long term. But perhaps that will make things complicated.

    9. Board members: Board members should have very logical skills to be a board member like:
      a. Cooperation skills.
      b. Experience as architect/engineer/developer.
      c. An essential skill/property of the members of the board is IMHO Humility combined with Ambition. The humility takes care of social harmony. Very important also because of a lot of communication goes via forum and emails and misunderstandings and irritations can easily enter the scene.

    10. Perhaps board members should be chosen from local chapters.

    Risks:
    1. For a couple of years I was a treasurer in a music foundation. After almost 4 years the whole board stopped because of a conflict with the leader. Some observations:
    i. In many boards there is a lot of powerplay and self-loving people who are more interested in themselves instead of the aim/goal of the foundation and are unable to discuss on arguments.
    ii. The foundation structure and roles should match the structure and the role in the real world. If there is a discrepancy between the two, sooner or later things will go wrong.
    iii. Duration of board membership should be limited.

    1. Potential risks in getting things structured and organised:
      a. The danger of Power & Money: the weird thing regarding power is that on one or the other way positions with power have a high attraction for persons who are more interested in their own person & their career and importance then in the goal/aim of the position/foundation where they are in. I think every technician has had any experience in his live that his manager/director is more interested in powerplay/his person then in the real subject.

    b. You see it in several Revit/BIM user groups. In several cases there are a lot of managers/theoretical persons/BIM-managers with their own pet peeves. Engineers, managers and architects who are more in-depths start to ignore it because they are tired of political BIM-games.

    c. Sometimes BIM-managers from large architectural firms/building contractors become involved. Some of them have a certain arrogance that their opinion or/and the opinion of their employer is leading because they are this and this big in the industry. Instead of having in-depth objective discussions on subjects they start using arguments which are based on the size of their company. In other words: the principle of powerplay. This powerplay aspect can bring great harm to the OS Community because it stands perpendicular to the principles of the OS Community.

    Goals for 2021
    1. Last year I thought a lot about setting up a foundation for OS fundraising. That's still the plan. Perhaps it's possible to name this as an OSArch chapter. But you can also start fundraising without it. Just spread the OS ideas to medium and big companies and ask them to ask donating.

    1. Last week I had my first fundraising talk with a big architectural firm in the Netherlands. Names will follow later on LinkedIn & Twitter. They were very enthusiastic and will support at least 5K/year. (I should have asked more I think now) :-)

    2. Next week and the week after next week I have 2 other fundraising meetings with other architectural firms. Hopefully the amount of donation via Patreon and Libera Pay will experience exponential growth in the coming 6 months so that several developers like Yorik van Havre, Realthunder and many more can start committing 100% of their time to Open Source Development. They are very valuable creators and it is a real pity that they cannot commit 100% of the their time to their creations because of the lack of funding on this moment.

    3. So that's also a way to look at it. As soon as the OS donations will increase several developers will receive more money and will contribute more of their time. I think other people will also follow. Everyone can see what the developers are doing via Github etc. So perhaps it's an evolutionary process.

    Looking forward to your response.

    MoultduncanJesusbilliosvarmsstephen_lLaurensJN
  • @MaartenFrough lots to read there. Didn't really find anything I don't agree with. So thanks for a really interesting contribution to this discussion. Of course a lot of your points would need more consideration to be put into action.
    One thing where I would say "yes... and" is about local chapters. I would be very keen for existing groups to just mark their support by joining rather than osarch setting something up. There are lots of Dynamo Users Groups ad AECHackathon groups out there who could be very open to having a relationship with us in some way. I see advantages to puting our ideas/brand/movement inside existing structures whenever possible rather than creating our own structures.

    Another interesting thing I hear recently is the idea (which the European parliament uses) that leading the committee is on a rotation basis. This has in studies been shown to help avoid the egotistical types - since they can't be sure of having power any time soon. No, I can't remember where I heard this ... probably a TED Talk. I think that's a really interesting idea.

  • Thanks @MaartenFrough for your perspective. A few comments

    • I think starting local chapters is a good idea, but I don't think the OSArch organization is big enough, currently, to warrant it. In other organizations, it seems local chapters are introduced when the organization get so big they need another 'tier' to help organize things.
    • Yes, having developers be a key make up of the organization is key, but also believe users should be equally represented. I think that's one shortcoming of BuildingSmart, that users are not being represented enough.

      • Ultimately, I don't think we should have hard categories such as user group, or a developer group. I think if there's a robust, democratic way to determine board members, I think all the different interests will be represented.
    • Instead of making up our own rules on how board members are established, I think we should try and embrace, as much as possible, third party platforms that facilitate Collaborative e-democracy, Open-source governance or Decentralized autonomous organization. By embracing a 3rd party 'platform' it will make decisions easier and insure 'distributed' management of the organization.

    MoultDADA_universeduncan
  • edited February 2021

    @theoryshaw can you update the page below with details of the gitlab project you've started?
    https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=Donation_Directory
    The project about making drawings awesome is also missing.

  • This podcast has some interesting episodes about funding and community building
    https://podcast.sustainoss.org/about

  • This thread about writing a reply to a CAD newsletter has implications for governance: https://community.osarch.org/discussion/468/autodesk-wants-to-kill-the-file

  • edited March 2021

    This proposal about supporting a project has implications for this thread: https://community.osarch.org/discussion/470/fustic-future-sustainable-territories-infrastructures-and-cities

  • I would like to suggest that we open for nominations to a temporary steering committee. We can see how many people are nominated and accept and then see if there is a need to do any more.

    Why?

    I think we are mature enough to make some decisions a bit faster. We can voice our support for specific projects, we can make an activity plan for the coming year, we can start discussing concrete ways of gathering funds, talk to specific people on behalf of OSArch and so on. Of course some of this could be done in a much slower process, but I suggest we have a steering committee who can propose plans of action and then, with consent, begin implementing them. Initially I think anyone who has written themselves on the supporters page can nominate anyone else (best to ask the person first) and then we can see where things are.

    I have some suggestions to what the steering committee should have top of the agenda
    1. submit a description of their role in OSArch for consent by members/supporters
    2. make a plan for creating a legal entity
    3. Make a plan for creating a stronger replacement committee with a broader foundation in the AEC community
    4. I suggest the temporary steering committee has a life of 12 months with the aim of being replaced by something more permanent as soon as practical.

    What could go wrong?

    We want to be careful and slow about making any structural decisions that have long reaching consequences. A temporary steering committee could speak on behalf of the groups, that means they could say things someone doesn't like. That's just life.

    SigmaDimensions
  • Here's the text of a comment @Moult wrote in the chat of our monthly meetup. For now it's just here as a record.
    Text summary:
    - 2 week public window on forums for all new proposals in association with OSArch
    - Duncan to lead legal representation of OSArch, he is the decision maker
    - Scope of legal representation of OSArch is money and enterprise affiliation only
    - Nominate small group of people who we consider represent OSArch values. These people have the power to "prevent" a project being associated with OSArch, this is only relevant in proposals that deal with legal/enterprise affiliation. Other project specific decision making is unaffected.

    lukasJanFJesusbillSigmaDimensionsbaswein
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