How we work

Governance, funding and roadmap — stated plainly, dated, and separated into what's done and what's planned.

Governance

Fold Commons is a non-profit; incorporation and fiscal sponsorship in progress. It is run by a founder with open board seats. Decisions that shape the tools are written down; the code is Apache 2.0 and the research content is CC BY 4.0.

Fold Commons is the non-profit at foldcommons.org; it is unrelated to the theFoldSF/foldCommons repository.

Funding

Fiscal sponsorship: In progress via NumFOCUS or OMSF (OMSF is the best fit for molecular software). Donations are not open yet.

Where support would come from: Grants (OS4LS / Renaissance Philanthropy, OMSF, NumFOCUS, NSF POSE), foundation support, and individual donations once open. No ads, no paid tiers, no data brokerage.

What it costs to run: deliberately little. The tools run entirely in your browser — your device talks directly to public databases (the AlphaFold DB, UniProt, the PDB), so there are no servers to pay for and no per-use compute bill. The recurring costs are a domain name and Cloudflare (Workers + static assets).

Roadmap

Done

14 free, zero-install browser tools live today — the viewer plus analysis, learning and reading tools.
One status source and dated, product-accurate privacy and terms pages.

In progress

Fiscal sponsorship via NumFOCUS or OMSF. Donations are not open yet.

Planned

FoldLens native v1.0 ship + Apache 2.0 source publication — target 2027 Q2.
A Zenodo DOI per release and a bio.tools entry, at or near v1.0.

The dated, one-line-per-release history is on the changelog (latest: Web-first redesign, Wave 1, 2026-09-20), which also feeds the RSS feed.

Code of Conduct & security

We follow the Contributor Covenant. Report conduct concerns to conduct@foldcommons.org and security issues per security.txt (security@foldcommons.org).