Development and initial implementation of a robust sustainability plan

[BenJam]

In order to create unrestricted, influence-free financial support to cover both the core team and incidental expenses.

• scope out all available avenues
• discount those that are against values
• discount those that are at odds with strategy
• pursue those that remain

[BenJam]

Just completed first draft of sustainability strategy. Highlights:

Our short term strategy is centred on three activities:

Continuing to generate ad revenue: Libraries.io currently receives $1,500/month in ad revenue. We will continue to use Google’s advertising platform throughout 2017 to reach our target of $18,000 toward a committed $25,000 to the Ford and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundations.

Charging for access to Libraries.io’s API at scale: Access to the Libraries.io API is currently limited to 60 requests per minute per API key, included within each request. We have seen organisations purposefully circumventing this limitation by registering multiple keys and cycling them. We will publish terms limiting organisations to a single key while charging for higher rates of access.

Further grant applications to supplement income from 2018: We will look to a select few institutions with whom we can provide genuine value as a service provider as well as grantee. The Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation and Open Tech Fund for example.

In addition we will openly engage with inbound opportunities to sponsor or licence Libraries.io services from commercial organisations, where there is no conflict of interest with our product or sustainability strategy.

Our long term strategy is to build commercial services to sustain Libraries.io utilising Libraries.io data, while contributing to the overall mission. DependencyCI is the first of these products.

[BenJam]

update: due to some issues that we've been having around the legal status of services provided by libraries.io we have been unable to charge for services directly. As a result we are currently underperforming on revenue targets (approx ~£3,500 since November on a target of $25,000).

It's likely that we will need to register a legal entity in the UK to manage services direct to Libraries.io, in addition to the existing one for dependencyci.com.

Finally it's obvious that, with @andrew and I working full time on Libraries.io we will need to raise additional funding to support DependencyCI.com either through custom acquisition or in exchange for shares. As the goal of DependencyCI.com is ultimately to sustain Libraries.io it's necessary to establish a legal relationship between Libraries.io and DependencyCi.com yet again calling for a need for Libraries.io to have its own legal status.

[BenJam]

Happy with this. Minor update(s) needed to clarify the strategy/strategies we're pursuing.