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**Kris Borchers:** Right, absolutely. We're looking to support as much as we can, and there's not necessary a relationship between our projects. We're very much an umbrella like the Linux Foundation is. I like to compare us to the Linux Foundation, just focused on JavaScript. We have all of these independent projects t... |
**Jerod Santo:** Back to the funding, what I'm stuck on is it seems like we have a lot of these projects that are popular and relied upon, and we have a lot of these companies who are forward with their capital or they're very interested in supporting said things, and there's a lot that goes around it, but wouldn't mon... |
I keep thinking about Webpack, because I'm partial to Webpack I have a friend that's involved, Sean Larkin - shout out, Omaha, Nebraska... |
**Kris Borchers:** Sean's the one that I worked with to make this happen, because he wanted it to come in... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so I think about Sean because he's very much trying to find ways that he can continue to work on Webpack a lot and find sustainability in that, if possible. He's looking at -- I think they joined OpenCollect... We have Kickstarter models, we have Patreon people... Developers are trying different ... |
**Kris Borchers:** You've got a couple of really good points there, and we've thought a lot about this. Where we fall on this right now... So we have done some direct funding of developers in the past, and it works... What we found though, is that sometimes when we start paying a developer - especially if we're paying ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, that's interesting... |
**Kris Borchers:** \[12:01\] ...because then there's less for them to do, so then we may not need to pay them anymore. |
**Jerod Santo:** I never saw it from that angle, that's interesting. |
**Kris Borchers:** And that's not to say that that always happens, but it's a possibility, so we try to avoid that. We really like the model of some of these member organizations - or other companies that maybe aren't our members yet - funding developers that are working on projects. Your point about them potentially h... |
One of the things that we launched when we launched the JS Foundation is this mentorship program. What we focus on in that mentorship program are those policies, and making sure that a project implements policies like "We don't allow more than one third of our committers to be from the same company." So even if one com... |
**Jerod Santo:** I see. |
**Kris Borchers:** That kind of keeps that in check. Obviously, if there's enough pressure from the organization and they can convince the team to do those things, then it's gonna get in. Again, we don't get in the way of that either, because it's up to the project to make those decisions. But I think if they're able t... |
I don't worry too much about overinfluence from companies on a project, as long as we get those policies in place and they follow those policies. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, a lot of nuance... |
**Kris Borchers:** Absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...and a lot of careful thinking it seems like that you're going through in order to not create false incentives, and create the middleman in a way that's right, and there's a lot of things to think about, so I appreciate your efforts in that regard. |
**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, for sure. |
**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about membership real quick, and then we'll talk about your sponsors. So let's say I have a JS project and I'm thinking, "Oh, that sounds perfect for me." What does the membership process look like? How do I become the next Webpack or the next jQuery, to become a JS Foundation member? |
**Kris Borchers:** Just to clarify terms... So we call those our projects. The supporting companies, we call them members. It's also very much not a "pay to play" model either; I like to make sure that that's clear, as well. |
**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about both sides, then. Let's talk about projects, first. |
**Kris Borchers:** Okay, so in terms of projects, we are in the process of finalizing a charter for what we call our Technical Advisory Committee. I think I mentioned this earlier, but we were waiting until we were launched and we had our projects set, at least for now, to involve them in sort of the final details and ... |
Within there there is a project lifecycle document, and there is an application in there. It's literally just, "Tell us about your project. Here's what we wanna know, and then send a pull request." |
**Jerod Santo:** Is there a certain look and feel that you're looking for? What increases my odds, in terms of the way my project looks? Nothing? |
**Kris Borchers:** No... One of the things we haven't finalized - because we specifically wanted to leave this to the technical side of the house - are the general metrics they're going to follow when they admit a project. We didn't want that coming from the business side. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[16:10\] Gotcha. |
**Kris Borchers:** So we don't have those metrics, but it's going to be, I would say, a pretty low bar, because we wanna support as much as we can. The real limiting factor will be mentors, and actually having boots on the ground that can go help a project work through the mentorship program. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Kris Borchers:** We'll be building those as we go as well, so our hope is that it will become this cycle of once we've gotten a few projects through - because we do have some that we've already assigned mentors, and once they've gone through that process, we can start pulling from those projects as new mentors. That ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Makes sense. |
**Kris Borchers:** In terms of what we're looking for - nothing in particular, because we have everything from low-level utility libraries like Lodash to full applications like Node-RED to JerryScript (a JavaScript engine for IoT devices). |
**Jerod Santo:** Cool. Tell me about membership now. You said it's not a pay-to-play model. (Now these are your sponsors?) |
**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, so what I was trying to make sure I separated there was to bring a project in or to use any of our projects or contribute to any of our projects, you do not need to be a member, you do not need to give us any money. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. How do you do that? |
**Kris Borchers:** The projects can come from anywhere. Anybody can come jump in on our projects. You can go to js.foundation/projects, see all of our projects and find one that interests you. Another part of that mentorship process - which we're just starting, so most of the projects won't have it yet - is we will enc... |
So anyone can get involved in a project, contribute to it, use it; you don't have to be a member. Obviously, we do encourage - especially companies bringing projects in, that they're going to be supporting anyways, it would be great if they also become members, because we do need funding to provide a lot of the things ... |
In terms of membership, we're open to any organization as well. If you are a large enterprise organization that has interests in a bunch of our projects, and you've got people working on them and you wanna support the foundation, make sure it's around so that those projects are supported, then memberships are a great w... |
Same thing for smaller companies. If you have a smaller organization and you're looking to have a bigger voice in things like standards - we have representatives at W3C, we have representatives in ECMA/TC39, so that's a great way to get involved that way, as well. |
There's different pricing structures and different benefits that come along with that. Our top-level members get a seat on our board of directors; the middle level, it's kind of a one board seat for every five, so that group of members just kind of decides amongst themselves who will represent them. |
\[20:02\] The top level has a flat fee, the middle level is kind of a tiered fee based on your employee size; we try to make it a little bit fairer, so that smaller companies can pay less, larger companies pay a little more. |
Then we also have an associate level membership, and that's free. It's for non-profits and academic institutions, just to give them some recognition for teaching curriculum that involves our projects, or getting their students involved in open source, things like that. |
**Jerod Santo:** Let's close with some shout outs, because I think these companies that support open source are very important. We like to praise anybody who puts their money where their source is, so that they are contributing to the sustainability of what we're all trying to do. I think that whatever good will is com... |
**Kris Borchers:** Sure. I think I have to start with IBM. They've been with us for a long time at the jQuery Foundation, and now they're also still supporting us in the JS Foundation. Our other platinum, top-level member that just came in is Samsung. They've been a really great partner; they brought in the JerryScript... |
Then we have seven silver members, and you're gonna make me remember them... |
**Jerod Santo:** You don't have to... |
**Kris Borchers:** No, but I should. So Boku - a lot of people in the JavaScript world should know Boku. They've been with us at the jQuery Foundation and have also come along to the JS Foundation. SitePen as well. SitePen is another company that supports a lot of JavaScript; they still support Dojo, and they were in e... |
**Jerod Santo:** I don't even recall that. |
**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, so SitePen is still on board. Then we have SauceLabs, and they also brought in the Appium project, which is really cool for mobile device automation and testing. |
**Jerod Santo:** Is that a cross-platform thing? |
**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, it'll do web apps, and then it will do native, iOS, Android and universal Windows platform apps as well. I actually saw a really cool demo a while back where they were actually automating the calculator on a Windows 10 laptop. |
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