Haidra is now an non-profit registered in Luxembourg!

Background: Haidra has, up until now, been the informal group behind AI-Horde and has been dedicated to providing free and open-source services and software. We are all volunteers ourselves, and we rely entirely on volunteer effort to develop, operate and maintain our services, which we offer free of charge.

Incorporation Announcement

We are happy to announce that Haidra has incorporated in the state of Luxembourg as a non-profit entity. The full legal name is "Haidra, a.s.b.l.".

This brings to a close over 6 months of effort by the main contributors of the AI Horde, db0, and tazlin. This was the result of our investigation into how to keep funding sustainable and future-proof our projects. The decision to establish our legal presence in Luxembourg was informed by db0 being a resident and our server infrastructure being located throughout Europe.

Purpose and Structure

The primary purpose of this new organization is to officially hold all the keys and financial responsibility for the running of the AI Horde, which is a shift away from db0 personally doing so. This creates a more viable path forward in the case of extreme unforeseen circumstances to any individual contributor, ensuring Haidra and its projects will continue regardless. This also simplifies fiscal control and allows us to pursue additional crowdsourced funds for Haidra-owned GPUs, open Open Collective funding, access to additional grants, and we are pursing tax-exempt status which will allow donations to go further. Expect to see future announcements as we continue to develop these initiatives.

Haidra starts with 3 board members, Konstantinos Thoukydidis (db0) as chair, Michael Brissette (tazlin) as Secretary and Mads Engelund as Treasurer. Haidra will be fairly limited in scope, though it does formalize the most important forms of decision making, especially to do with financial matters.

Governance and Decision-Making

While the Board will steer the organization, we continue to believe in the power of open-source and intend to continue to ensure individual contributor autonomy. Member projects can continue handling their project as they see fit and they will have a voice in the path Haidra is taking. For example, the AI Horde will continue using loomio to allow the ecosystem's stakeholders to take part in the decision-making, even without being Haidra members proper. We plan to use loomio for other projects by default, however, based on that project's stakeholder consensus, they can use any other preferable method.

We are not requiring the transfer of any copyright by any contributor to Haidra at this time.

Membership

Existing members of the community, integrators, and other valued contributors can expect to be extended offers to join as members in the coming weeks. Anyone who has made noteworthy contributions, given advice or council, or provided other material assistance to either the AI Horde or other Haidra interests may be eligible for membership moving forward. However, we will be operating on an invite-only basis for the time being. We will continuously review this policy as we grow to ensure we strike the right balance between stability and inclusion.

Membership in Haidra comes with legally binding voting rights and we have crafted the charter to emphasize fairness, including giving all members equal voting rights, permitting for more democratic voting schemes such as Ranked-Choice Voting, and emphasizing the duty all members have to pursue, in good faith, our objective of providing free and open services for the public good.

Organization Scope

While AI Horde is currently our flagship accomplishment, Haidra was created to maitain stewardship of other projects as well. We intend to serve as fiscal host for both the Fediseer and the Divisions by zero lemmy. The following types of projects are within our mandate and charter:

• Generative AI (including text, image, video, and audio)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Any software or technology which significantly reduces barriers to access, understanding or utilization of knowledge, data, or computational resources.
• Software which improves the free flow of information, as well as services which promote discussion of existing or frontier technologies and their social impacts.
• Essential enabling technologies, standards, and infrastructures supporting the above systems
• and most importantly, all such technologies that we assume stewardship of must be open-source, and must not be for profit making purposes.

We will do our very best to keep the Haidra organization squarely focused on facilitating sharing resources and ideas.

Community Participation

We have always relied on the open-source community and the time and effort of volunteers. If you are looking to participate in any of our projects, there has never been a better time to contribute to a Haidra project. Find us on Github, our discord or contact us if you would like to start. However, there is no requirement to declare your intent to start working on a Haidra project: we encourage bold contributions of any size, whether that be a pull request, opening an issue/feature request, or editing one of our wikis.