[Ground-station] One year anniversary of Open Research Institute 501(c)(3)

[Michelle Thompson]

March 6th is Open Research Institute's 501(c)(3) anniversary. As it's our
first birthday, we are going to celebrate!

ORI is incorporated in California, USA. There are a lot of statistics
available for CA non-profits from https://calnonprofits.org/ which is an
organization that provides support to directors and officers and the
general public about the non-profit landscape. Here's the highlights from
their recent report that are relevant to what we are doing, followed by how
we fit in and where we can go next.

There are 27,317 nonprofits with paid staff in California, and another
65,250 (70%) that are all-volunteer organizations, for a total of 92,567
active nonprofits.

We are all volunteer, with no paid staff, so that puts us into the larger
of the two categories.

11.7% of non-profits are categorized as "public benefit", which is what we
do and is how we are set up. Specifically, we are a scientific and
technology research institute. We're part of a very small group of
non-profits that fall into the public benefit category. Definition in the
paragraph below:

"In this report, three common nonprofit organizational classifications
(mutual benefit, public societal benefit, and otherwise uncategorized
nonprofits) have been merged to create this category. Organizations include
those working with civil rights and community development, advocacy groups,
neighborhood associations, business leagues, civic and service clubs,
science and technology organizations, credit unions, and public grantmaking
foundations."

So, how many other non-profits are like us? I don't know yet, but I'm
asking calnonprofits.org how to find out! Maybe we could all help each
other better if we knew about each other and what we were doing.

California nonprofits employ a significantly higher percentage of women and
a slightly higher percentage of people of color than the overall civilian
workforce.

Contrary to common perception, the largest sources of nonprofit revenue are
fees for service and government grants and contracts. We are different
here, since 100% of our revenue to date is individual donations. We now
have $18,875. I’m working as hard as I can to grow our finances.

Volunteerism in CA has undergone some changes since 2014, the last time
that this particular study was completed. The percentage of adult
volunteers has risen slightly, from 24% to 25%, but the number of hours per
volunteer is down by 25%. What are the underlying reasons for this?
Volunteerism is difficult when it's crowded out by so many other demands on
time. Activity in organizations and associations has been in decline since
the 1950s. There’s whole books written about the theories as to why.

A lot of what we do requires skills that are earned through years of
education, training, workplace, self-training, or avocational effort. While
our mission is to demystify and make accessible advanced engineering
concepts, we don't dumb it down. We break it down. Regardless, it's still
hard work and requires real commitment and a willingness to fail along the
way. That's a lot to ask of volunteers, but our community has delivered.
The number of hours donated to the effort is deeply appreciated, especially
given the context of the statistics in this particular and admittedly
geographically limited report. California trends don't necessarily mirror
the rest of the world, but I do hear a lot of the same sort of thing from a
wide variety of volunteer driven organizations. Everyone seems to be doing
more with less and under harder conditions.

That's why it's so important to make it easy to volunteer, reduce as many
risks as possible from regulatory and legal points of view, and take on
things worth doing that are ambitious and rewarding. We have done our best
to do exactly this - especially over the past year! We have written clear
developer and participant policies, we have a code of conduct, and we filed
a Commodity Jurisdiction request to clarify how we fit into ITAR and EAR.
Our technical progress has been steady and we are at the point where we can
build functional prototypes.

If you have feedback or suggestions on how we have chosen to support,
protect, and enable volunteers then please share.

The report states that non-profits with large budgets have more access to
government funding and rely on it as a significant source of revenue. The
findings suggest that non-profits can not "grow large" without government
funding. There is a big difference between small non-profits, like us, and
larger non-profits, like many healthcare organizations. Healthcare is by
far the largest category of non-profits in CA, and they get their money
from different places.

How big do we need to be to succeed? Do we have to go after government
money to achieve that goal, given the realities of other non-profits?

Foundations were not the focus of the study, but the report talks about
them for several reasons. First, CA is a net exporter of foundation grant
money, and the report lists the top 25 foundations. The total assets of all
~7,000 CA foundations are $137.5 billion and they gave away a total of $9.5
billion. These numbers are for 2019. The single largest foundation
is Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which gave away nearly a billion
dollars *alone*. San Francisco is far and away the hot spot in CA in terms
of foundation dollars generated and many other categories in the study.

For 90% of nonprofits, foundation funds represent 50% or less of their
revenue. For the "bottom" 50% of non-profits, foundations fund less than
10% of revenue. Only 5% of non-profits get more than 75% of their revenue
from foundations. The perception that foundations fund non-profits is
widespread, but the statistics in CA do not bear that out. Where is all the
foundation money going? Like we see with a lot of other resource allocation
patterns, most of the money goes to a few organizations.

What does all of this mean for us going forward?

If we can't raise additional funds for the *products* that we want to
build, then those things won't happen. The financial needs are greater for
the open source payload part than ground. However, without a payload or
groundsat, the ground station design simply doesn't work. We have a product
envisioned. It's the right time to step up and deliver. This the
“development” part of “research and development”.

Yes, we’ve done very well building ORI from scratch and raising significant
amount of money in a short amount of time. We’ve also had fun in the
process, with very successful outreach events and the Trans-Ionospheric
badges.

Fundraising was not at all what I thought I would be doing when I agreed to
come aboard as a technical volunteer for Round Two of "build a GEO for
amateur radio" several years ago, but addressing it like any other
challenge, building a team, and tackling it with optimism and a willingness
to learn has had good results.

Other organizations related to us generate revenue in other ways. It's
important to talk about what those strategies are and whether we should
adopt the same methods. For example, a lot of amateur radio technical and
advocacy organizations have member fees and generate income that way. We
don’t do this, and have not since the very beginning of ORI, for several
reasons.

First, the amount of time required to manage and account for paid
memberships is non-trivial.

Second, paid members have expectations that must be met. Members expect
services that must be delivered. We are not a member service organization,
we're a research institute. Our "members" are projects, and the expectation
is that we help with scientific and technical goals. Member services,
newsletters, trinkets, swag, books, producing social events, contests, and
conferences are wonderful things that we love to see happen. ORI doesn’t
*regularly* do those things because scientific and technical work is the
very firm focus. This doesn’t mean we won’t have a conference, if it serves
the research institute mission. It doesn’t mean that we won’t have a
t-shirt, another badge project, or a newsletter, if that serves the
research institute mission. The functions and benefits of a membership
organization were what I thought we would be getting when the Phase 4
Ground project was part of AMSAT-NA. Now that we are a Member Society of
AMSAT, over time, we should start seeing support, promotion, and
cooperation. We are also associated with Open Source Initiative as a Member
Affiliate of OSI.

Third, I believe that ORI must remain open to all, without the “us” and
“them” that often arises when memberships are purchased. Individuals are
“members” of ORI as soon as they show up and participate in the community
at any level. There is no process of “joining”.  Associate Membership, the
only explicit membership status, is free for the asking and will stay that
way. The way we’re organized and the practice of radical inclusion should
be very familiar to anyone looking at open source technical projects and
how they are commonly structured.

This structure (completely open, collaborative flat leadership structure,
no membership dues) is common and highly effective, but it also opens us up
to significant risks. Burnout of leaders, no easily distributed tokens or
artifacts of membership to build pack bonding or loyalty, we give up “easy”
financial income, and the repercussions of the intermittent nature of
volunteering. These are the facts on the ground and we do whatever it takes
to deal with them.

If we converted to a membership organization, we would gain some reliable
revenue, but would give up a large part of what makes us extremely
successful, adaptable, agile, and accessible. We’re here to supercharge
organizations that don’t have a pure technical focus. Over time, I expect
organizations that benefit from our work to help us in places where we need
assistance, such as fundraising, marketing, promotion, and publishing.

Research and Development will always be a sink for money and will always be
higher risk than delivering customary or traditional member services.
Research and Development needs fearless funding.

In our first year, we have applied for several grants that would
financially support the first phase of the transponder build. The
foundations approached are in the amateur radio space and their values and
conditions seem to align almost perfectly with us. You can read the
proposal documents on the website.

We have early indications of valuable in-kind contributions from companies
that want us to succeed. We have excellent relationships with universities
and engineering firms. We’ve made a dramatic contribution to testing the
regulatory process as well as enumerating ambitious yet achievable
technical goals. We have the ingredients for success. Our second year will
be as crucial as the first in terms of deciding our long-term trajectory.

Thank you all for a fantastic first year!

-Michelle W5NYV
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