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Clarify Foundation legal status requirements #51

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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion _pages/entities.md
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Expand Up @@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ Many important and self-organized FOSS projects are not legal entities; however

## Entity Modeling

"Foundations" here are defined as legal non-profit entities: either a 501C3/C6 in the US, or a registered charity in various other countries. That enables tracking and comparisons of governance, finances, and other organizational factors that are legally required. Non-foundation entities may also have governance and a budget, but have different kinds of constraints than legal entities. *Work in progress.*
Unlike foundations, which we define as [legal non-profit entities](/fdnmodel#inclusion-criteria), non-foundation entities are not incorporated, so cannot be compared on the basis of legally required characteristics, such as articles of incorporation, financial reports and so on. Non-foundation entities may also have governance and a budget, but have different kinds of constraints than legal entities. Here's a work-in-progress set of attributes for non-foundation entities.

- identifier: similar to foundations, name of the file, for easy lookups to sponsorship models
- commonName, description, and other common metadata about a project
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11 changes: 11 additions & 0 deletions _pages/fdnmodel.md
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Expand Up @@ -28,6 +28,17 @@ Our focus is on legal organizations that host, organize, and help sustain major

Things that may be listed informally, but not as vetted data sets, include: [commercial companies](commercial) (of any kind), and the many non-incorporated open source projects without legal organizations. Limited listings of [individual open source projects](projects) hosted at Foundations are included to help provide context.

Note that Foundations are incorporated under many different forms around the world:

* In the US, Foundations take the form of a 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6).
* In the UK, non-profit status and charity status are distinct: a UK Foundation might be registered as a [company limited by guarantee][clg] that does not allow profit distribution; and this organisation may or may not have [charity status][charitable-purposes].
* …and other jurisdictions operate differently.

For this reason, when deciding whether an organisation should be classified as a Foundation, it's important to understand the requirements for non-profit status in that organisation's specific jurisdiction.

[clg]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_limited_by_guarantee
[charitable-purposes]: https://www.gov.uk/setting-up-charity/charitable-purposes

## Model Structure

The core model starts with [Schema.org's Organization type](https://schema.org/Organization), since Foundations are always legal entities. We include a subset of Organization fields that cover common attributes that would be useful for selection or discovery. We then add a number of new fields around governance (both board and technical), IP policies, sponsorships/funding, brand, as well as a selection of common policy URLs for FOSS Foundations (when they exist).
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