The Center for the Cultivation of Technology is a charitable non-profit
host organization for international Free Software projects.
The Center for the Cultivation of Technology is a "backend provider" for the Open Source community. Affiliated projects use the legal entity to collect donations and to manage their budgets and assets, while we take care of organizational matters such as accounting, reimbursements and financial reporting.
The Center aims to become a lightweight scalable fiscal sponsorship "host", much like a "payment processor for unincorporated projects". But in most cases, we work closer with projects to identify funding opportunities, provide additional services (together with partner organizations), exchange knowledge about sustainable organizational development, and allow developers to focus on what they do best: write code.
Receive donations via various payment processors and fundraising platforms.
Manage and allocate budgets, process reimbursements, contract and employ internationally.
The Center can hold assets for a project, such as domain names, trademarks and copyright.
Knowledge sharing and exchange.
The goal is to optimize for self-organization within the project, with minimal "interference" by the host (but helpful advice and assistance when needed).
A lot of the design decisions for The Center are influenced by the primary goal of improving processes and automating workflows for any legal entity that hosts multiple independent projects. We collect and build open source tools that can be used in similar scenarios by other entities, and offer advice to projects with their own legal and organizational setups.
We are ready for your project if you need help with grants and contracts.
It will take us a while to build a platform to allow projects to easily interface with their budgets, and before we can manage individual donations to projects. Leave your e-mail address and we will get in touch as soon as we’re there!
All excited, and you want to help? Check out our issue tracker and come visit us on IRC!