foss-responders / about Goto Github PK

In order to gather information about who needs help, we should do proactive outreach to organizations like the Python Software Foundation and others.

We need someone to own the process for coordinating what organizations we reach out to, who is reaching out to them, what questions we are asking.

As we see different kinds of support requests, we will need to sort the into types and decide on a strategy for supporting the requests.

Some potential request types:

• Reimbursing low-income individuals who were traveling to a conference and who paid ticket/cancellation fees out of pocket;
• Offsetting cancellation-related fees incurred by conference organizers (food and drink minimums, non-refundable deposits, etc)
• Donating to foundations/projects who rely on conference income to sustain operations (lost ticket sales, etc)

Ways we might address each types of request:

• Individual Reimbursement - These might be hard for organizations to directly take on, but they could be managed via an open collective with community support, transparency, and vetting;
• Conference-Fees and Foundations/Projects - These might be easier for organizations to directly take on and could be managed via an RFP process

The raison d'être for this organization: building a quick and easy website for people to be able to find information about COVID-19 and how to find resources for their open source ecosystem problems.

This website needs to have the following minimally:

• What the mission of the website is: "Helping the open source community weather the coronavirus"
• Where to find information on Coronavirus: (elsewhere)
• What sort of resources we offer:
  • Reverse scholarships
  • Why you should cancel your meetup / conference / gathering
  • Resources for holding remote conferences
    • Remote hackathons?
  • Resources for working remotely or at home
  • Identifying organizations that need funding which normally comes from conferences to continue their work
  • Identifying at-risk individuals and projects
  • Help facilitiating aid within your OSPO or company
  • Tech resources for health workers working on coronavirus
• A way to get in touch publicly
• A way to get in touch privately
• How to get involved with this WG
• Sponsors
• A standard CoC for this space
• License and legal liability waiver

I'm not sure if we're GDPR compliant, at the moment. I don't have experience on this: anyone else?

Breaking Code of Conduct from #1 into a separate issue to ease discussion.

Since we are still working on the website and discourse set up, I'd like to have an issue dedicated to sharing resources with people so that we don't lose them.

If you have something you think would benefit our community during this COVID-19 response period, please post it here.

Relevant issue: Set up Discourse

The application requests need to be managed within the smaller Application and Oversight teams. To ensure that the teams can see the progress of each application, we will create a private repo where an issue is created for each request.
The ID of this issue becomes the Unique ID for each application and must be quoted in all future correspondence between fossreposnders and the applicant.
We will create a Kanban board to monitor progress and a series of issue tags to show which applications have been awarded etc

FOSS-responders is a pop-up response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to help FOSS organizations that are dealing with the ramifications of canceling events.

Since people and orgs are donating money, I think it'd be good to define at least an initial strategy for the length of this initiative. For example, when will we start phasing it out and how will we deal with any left over funds? Do we see this group and community staying together somehow or merging with another community?

Having some idea of a duration timeline for this will also help the initial participants of this group set expectations around their availability, and help find reinforcements / build a team if necessary.

Guiding Questions

• Should we set an initial duration timeline and then reassess? What are the factors that determine the need for our response?
• What do we do with any extra funds, if we get to that?
• What do we do with the community that we build?