FSFE financial transparency

[Jonas Oberg]

Hi Daniel,

> I feel there is a bit of a gap between these two pages and it does not
> reveal how fellowship contributions relate to other revenue.

That's surprising to me, because if you click down to 2016 as an example,
you will find the answer to your first question:

> - what is the total sum from the fellowship program and what is it as a
> percentage of total revenue?

https://fsfe.org/about/funds/2016.en.html gives fellowship contributions
of 187,247.70 EUR compared to a total income of 649,194.75, so the
percentage of total income is ca 29%.

> - how many fellows contribute to the program?

That information is typically not published, but it's available to our
core team internally, and you should have that information in the weekly
reports you receive.

> - what is the total percentage of funds from the top 5 corporate donors?
> - list the top 20 donors by percentage, without their names perhaps

We list information about our donors according to the German Transparency
International's initiative "Transparent Civil Society". You can find more
information here:

  https://fsfe.org/about/transparency-commitment.en.html

This also means we list publicly those who contribute more than 10% of our
annual budget. If you propose we go further in our transparency than this,
I believe you should make a proposal for this to the members.

> - are there any revenue sources other than direct donations to FSFE, for
> example, revenue from the summit and legal network/workshop?  Have these
> already been included in the public revenue figures?  Are the total
> receipts or only the profit from such events counted as part of the
> revenue total?

As mentioned, on the detailed page for each fiscal year, you can find a
breakdown of the income in more details including our income from merchandise
and paid services. The latter is typically income rendered from speaker's
fees and similar.

People then donate to the FSFE for a variety of reasons: some do it because
they appreciate our internship program, others because they would like to
support our legal work. I'm not aware of any donation which is earmarked for
a specific purpose, and so regardless of *why* people donate, we list it
as a donation.

Then, separately, we of course also list our expenses for our areas of
work, including our legal work which then includes management of the legal
network and our annual Legal & Licensing Workshop.


Sincerely,

-- 
Jonas Öberg, Executive Director
Free Software Foundation Europe | jonas at fsfe.org
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