Open Source Justice Foundation. The Open Source Justice Foundation’s mission is to increase access to justice through the development and adoption of dispute resolution tools built with open-source technologies and protocols. Open-source tools can empower individuals and communities to resolve their own disputes peacefully and voluntarily without resort to state-run courts, and guided by their own norms and standards of acceptable social conduct. To advance its mission, the Foundation supports open-source contributors working on dispute resolution tools and complementary freedom technologies like Bitcoin, Nostr, and Fedimint. The Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity.
The “Foundation Formation Kit” Project. The project’s goal is to develop and offer a kit of resources to turn any open-source project into a tax-exempt non-profit foundation. Forming non-profits and obtaining tax-exempt status with the IRS is a time-consuming and opaque process that usually requires the services of legal counsel. This is largely cost-prohibitive for small- to medium-sized open-source projects. The Foundation Formation Kit will provide all the forms and instructions necessary for open-source projects to form their own foundations and apply for tax-exempt status, without legal overhead. Once established as non-profits, open-source projects can obtain financial support or crowdfunding and avoid onerous tax liability for sharing that support with their contributors and community.
The tax-exempt foundation structure has previously been the exclusive privilege of large and well-capitalized open-source projects. The Foundation Formation Kit will give all open-source projects access to the benefits of this structure, regardless of size or means. A more formalized legal framework will accelerate and grow capital allocation into the open-source space. The Foundation Formation Kit will thus transform an ad-hoc and fragile industry into a robust, distributed ecosystem of nonprofits supporting open-source contributions and development.
- Github repository with editable form templates:
- Corporate Bylaws
- IRS 1023 Application
- Documentation with instructions on process and use of forms.
- Different tracks for open-source projects or local communities (e.g. Bitcoin or Nostr meetups).
- Interactive website with Foundation Formation Wizard
- Web-app to take necessary information and autogenerate the necessary documents and forms.
- Filing Fee Fund to cover fees for incorporating entity and IRS filings.
- Education/Seminars with project and community leaders.
- Add human-rights-specific track for instructions/forms
- Add additional jurisdictions.
- Integrate with partner platforms like Geyser and the Foundation supported nostr-native project, Fundsolvr