Fundraising Commons Team 4 min read The Governance Firewall: Who Controls the Standard?
About the Author
The open, vendor-neutral commons behind the Advancement Common Data Model (ACDM™) and its free educational resources. We write about trustworthy advancement data, portability, and AI-readiness for fundraising teams of any size. Stewards are credited in the colophon, never in the byline.
If you are a Chief Information Officer (CIO) or IT Director evaluating the Advancement Common Data Model (ACDM™), you will eventually ask the most load-bearing question: “Who has the power to change this standard?”
If a single vendor has the unilateral authority to redefine fields, change schemas, or restrict usage, then the model is not a public standard—it is a vendor lock-in funnel under a different name.
To solve this, the Fundraising Commons is built on a Governance Firewall: a structural separation between the organizations that fund the standard and the rules that govern it. Here is how the firewall is constructed, and how it protects your technological independence.
1. The Separation of Funding and Steering
In the open-source world, funding is essential. Developing standards, drafting documentation, and hosting registries require resources. Rigason acts as the founding sponsor and steward of the Commons, providing this critical financial backing.
However, sponsorship does not buy control.
The steering of the standard is handled by an independent, multi-stakeholder group. This steering group includes:
- Higher Education Representatives: Database administrators and advancement services directors from small, mid-size, and enterprise institutions.
- Independent Consultants: System integrators and database administrators who work across multiple CRM platforms.
- Technology Partners: Representatives from conforming products and applications.
Sponsors hold a seat at the table, but they do not hold a veto. Decisions are made by consensus, ensuring that the standard serves the public good of the sector, rather than the commercial roadmap of one vendor.
Funding pays for the work. Governance decides what the standard becomes. A neutral standard is one where those are not the same hand.
2. Licensing: Legally Irreversible Openness
The strongest protection against vendor capture is not a policy statement—it is copyright law.
Every schema, mapping profile, and line of code in the Common Data Model Repository is published under the Apache License 2.0. All handbook chapters, blog posts, and educational guides are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0) license.
These open-source licenses are legally binding and permanent. Once code is released under Apache-2.0, it is in the public domain forever.
Even if a sponsor decided to withdraw funding or try to privatize the standard, they could not claw back what has already been published. Anyone in the sector would have the legal right to copy the repository, “fork” the standard, and continue running it independently. The openness of ACDM is structurally guaranteed by law.
3. The Public RFC Process
No schema modification can happen in secret. The Advancement Common Data Model has a strict RFC (Request for Comments) process:
┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
│ Propose Change │ ──> │ Public Debate │ ──> │ Steering Approval│
│ (GitHub Issue) │ │ (RFC discussion) │ │ (Consensus Vote) │
└──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘- Proposal: A developer, consultant, or vendor opens an issue on GitHub proposing a change to the schema (for example, adding a new field to support a specific type of restricted gift).
- Public Debate: The proposal is open for public comments. Practitioners from across the sector discuss the implications of the change, checking it against different CRM models (Salesforce, Microsoft, Blackbaud) to ensure compatibility.
- Approval: Only after consensus is reached does the steering group approve the pull request.
This transparency means that a sponsor cannot quietly insert vendor-specific fields that favor their own CRM, nor can they block changes that make it easier for clients to migrate to competing platforms.
Accuracy is Not Permission
Data ethics are hardcoded into our governance. The steering group will reject any schema proposal that violates donor privacy or makes it easier to run predictive scoring without explicit consent.
What You Verify
Neutrality is not a promise to believe; it is evidence you can check. As a CIO or IT Director, you can verify this firewall yourself:
- Review the GitHub History: Check the steering group votes and public discussion on the acdm GitHub repository.
- Inspect the Licenses: Verify the Apache-2.0 and CC-BY-4.0 headers on the source code.
- Monitor the Registry: Watch the Ecosystem Registry populate with products and service providers that compete with the founding sponsor.
The Governance Firewall is designed to keep the standard open, portable, and secure—so that no matter what changes in the commercial CRM market, your database foundation remains yours.
To see the organizations backing this standard, visit our Sponsors Page. To find certified partners and products, view the Ecosystem Registry.
All examples use synthetic data. The standard is open and early; treat current releases as drafts.
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