The Commons Conservancy

Speaker: Michiel Leenaars

Abstract

Small projects can grow big, but why should every successful FOSS project bootstrap its own foundation, when this invokes all kinds of bureaucratic burdens? The Commons Conservancy is a hypervisor for virtual foundations, a meta-foundation set up to help mature upcoming efforts around open technologies.

The Commons Conservancy facilitates healthy and self-supporting ecosystems that are sustainable in the long term. It does so by providing a free (in all senses of the word) infrastructure for coordination as well as a proper legal framework for governance over contributions made to the projects. By collaboration with well-known charities like NLnet and dedicated service providers it can provide a turn-key charitable and business infrastructure for your FOSS efforts.

Biography

Michiel Leenaars (1972, Netherlands) is the chairperson of The Commons Conservancy. In daily life he is Director of Strategy at NLnet Foundation. and director of Internet Society Netherlands, one of the more sizable Internet Society chapters in the world. He is also a W3C liason officer for the Benelux Office of the World Wide Web Consortium. He currently leads two of the four Research & Innovation Actions of the Next Generation Internet initiative, NGI Zero Discovery and NGI Zero PET.

He is active in a number of national and international organisations, such as OpenDoc Society (vice-chair), SIDN Fund (Board of Advisors), Digitale Infrastructuur Nederland, and Petities.nl foundation (treasurer). He is a member of the Netherlands committee for the UNESCO Information for All Programme.