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Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Comments on Introducing the Codidact Foundation

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Introducing the Codidact Foundation

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We are delighted to announce that The Codidact Foundation is now incorporated as a non-profit organization! We've incorporated in the UK as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a type of corporation that, by law, must operate for the public good. Income is reinvested in the organization; there are no shareholders nor private benefit. We’ve always been committed to being a non-profit; this makes it official.

While we’d like to have The Codidact Foundation be recognized as a charity (which comes with additional benefits for donors and the Foundation), the process can take quite a while. Since we wanted to get officially up and running as soon as possible, forming a CIC was the first step and is relatively quick. Now that we have this status, we can open a bank account, use it to pay expenses (instead of using people's personal credit cards), and accept donations. And we can now begin the process of converting the CIC to a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), a process that can take the better part of a year.

To form a corporation, we needed to designate an initial board of directors. This initial board consists of:[1]

  • ArtOfCode
  • luap42
  • manassehkatz
  • Mithical
  • Mithrandir24601
  • Monica Cellio
  • Sigma

All of these people have invested significant time and effort into the Codidact project, being Group Leads, Admins, or Leads already, and were willing to take on the extra responsibility of being members of the initial board.

One of the board's first tasks will be to develop the foundation's operating rules (bylaws). These operating rules will, among other things, specify how future directors are chosen. As we’ve promised from the beginning, this will include directors directly from the Codidact community itself; the community will always have a say in how the Foundation operates.

We are excited to have a legal entity with which to move forward. The incorporation documents involve a lot of legal minutiae that our legal consultant had to explain to us, so we want to write up a FAQ to publish alongside the foundation's constitution. We will, of course, publish updates as the board works through the next phases of the process.

We are, and will remain, “By the community, for the community.” We look forward to working together with our communities and other supporters to build an open platform and network with accountability.


  1. We list usernames here because these are the names you know us by. As part of filing for incorporation, we did verify people's actual identities and eligibility to serve on a board under the laws of the UK. ↩︎

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2 comment threads

Update about the Codidact Foundation (5 comments)
General comments (7 comments)
Update about the Codidact Foundation
Trilarion‭ wrote about 2 years ago

I was searching for public information about the Codidact Foundation (on codidact.org) and found only a link to this announcement. It says you are in the process to converting into a charitable organization and are working on bylaws but this post is more than a year old. I know that in the mean time a bank account was added, but has also progress been made towards the charitable organization and bylaws of the Foundation or is the situation more or less unchanged?

Also there is this address https://codidact-foundation.org/ that can be found when googling "Codidact Foundation" but it only gives a redirection error. Is it related to the foundation? Should the redirection maybe be corrected?

Is codidact.org the official website of the Codidact Foundation (if so maybe it should say somewhere on that page, for example the footer only says "Codidact The open source Q&A platform.")?

Mithrandir24601‭ wrote about 2 years ago

We've done some of the things we wanted to do - while we do now have a 'money account' (very similar to a bank account, except that there are different regulations and it stores a variety of currencies instead of a single one), getting a FSCS-regulated 'bank account' requires yet more things to sort out (unfortunately, this has been severely delayed due to covid). Practically, the account we have is more useful than the bank account we'd like to get but we still want to have this bank account as well. I'm hoping this will be sorted by the end of February.

Similarly, we have rules that are sufficient for us to function but we want additional rules in the future, such as the Arbitration & Review Panel, which at least exists in draft form. I believe we also want some kind of 'advisory panel' for the board, but we've yet to work out details beyond broad brush-strokes.

Mithrandir24601‭ wrote about 2 years ago · edited about 2 years ago

In writing the above, I've realised that we have a business plan in at least the final stages of draft form, which I need to finalise and upload here. I'll check with the other directors and if they're happy, this will be done within a week or two, longer if they're not.

All (or at least, most) of the above will come before converting to a charity - ideally, we want rules relating to e.g. the A&RP to be hard-coded into the official legal documents as much as possible, but this is considerably easier said than done, so I (for one) would rather get this right first time. Converting to a charity is a very slow process, so I'm not expecting it to be finished this year. Personally, I would at least want to be talking to our lawyer about it by summer and become a charity sometime in 2023, although I have no idea how optimistic this is.

Mithrandir24601‭ wrote about 2 years ago

Ultimitely, apologies for the delay, 2021 was just a slow year. Covid delayed things much more than I was expecting to, then I had my thesis to finish, so I made much less progress on the (non-thesis) things I was working on than I would have liked. I'll be starting a normal (at least, as far as working hours go) job in February and will get back to working properly on Codidact then as well.

The https://codidact-foundation.org/ site is unrelated to us. I believe that there used to be a company called codidact years ago but it no longer exists. codidact.org is the website I use when asked for the company's website on official forms, so I guess that counts! You make a fair point, so I've mentioned that to the other directors and we'll decide if we want to change anything (there are always other high priority things...)

Trilarion‭ wrote about 2 years ago

Mithrandir24601‭ Thank you for the extensive update. It's good to see progress is made even during such stressful times. If you need more feedback on policies of the panels, you can always ask for it on meta.

One last thing. Probably other people would be interested in reading this update too but it's quite hidden in a comment. Maybe it can be added to the announcement or since it is from one year ago, make an updated announcement with exactly this content.

All the best and hopefully 22 gets better than 21.