FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 15, 2011

Evergreen Joins the Software Freedom Conservancy

Today, the Software Freedom Conservancy welcomes the Evergreen project as its newest member. Evergreen joins twenty-six other Conservancy members, who receive the benefit of aggregated non-profit status available to all Conservancy member projects.

Conservancy and the Evergreen community, including librarians, developers, and documenters, are excited to announce that Evergreen is now a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The Software Freedom Conservancy provides a home to Free, Libre and Open Source Software
(FLOSS) projects. As a fiscal sponsor for FLOSS projects, the Conservancy provides member projects with financial and administrative services and FLOSS project policy and non-profit oversight. This allows software developers and documenters to focus on those activities exclusively.

By joining the Conservancy, Evergreen obtains the benefits of a formal non-profit organizational structure while keeping the project focused on software development and documentation. Some benefits of joining the Conservancy include the ability to collect donations, hold assets on behalf of the project, and some protection of the lead developers of the project from personal liability when engaging in the activities of the project. A full list of Conservancy member project benefits is available on Conservancy's website. The Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, incorporated in New York State.

About Evergreen

The Evergreen Project develops an open source ILS (integrated library system) used by hundreds of libraries across the world. The software, also called Evergreen, is used by libraries to provide their public catalog interface as well as to manage back-of-house operations such as circulation (checkouts and checkins), acquisition and cataloging of library materials, and sharing resources among groups of libraries and consortia on the same Evergreen system. Evergreen is designed to be scalable and supports library operations ranging from a small high school to large state-wide consortia. Evergreen is released under the GPL version 2 or later. The project homepage is http://evergreen-ils.org/.

http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Technology-and-social-networks.aspx

OVERVIEW
Questions have been raised about the social impact of widespread use of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project decided to examine social networking sites in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement.

The findings presented here paint a rich and complex picture of the role that digital technology plays in people’s social worlds. Wherever possible, we seek to disentangle whether people’s varying social behaviors and attitudes are related to the different ways they use social networking sites, or to other relevant demographic characteristics, such as age, gender and social class.

ABOUT THE SURVEY
The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from October 20 to November 28, 2010, among a sample of 2,255 adults, age 18 and older. Interviews were conducted in English, via landline and cell phone. For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. For results based on internet users (n=1,787), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.