One hundred years from now, future generations will have access to the unique visual content available on Flickr today as a result of the Flickr Foundation’s efforts to protect and preserve it.
Our Purpose
The world has never had a collection of 50 billion photos before, let alone a collection that’s growing quickly every day. What a precious thing.
The Flickr Foundation exists to develop and sustain an accessible social and technical infrastructure to protect this invaluable collection for future generations. We will work towards continuity that allows people to contribute to, learn from, and enjoy this treasure for years to come.
The groundbreaking Flickr Commons program will be sustained and supported by the Foundation. Our work will prioritise supporting smaller cultural organisations with tools, practice, and community to develop deeper public engagement with their photography collections.
We will:
- Support exchanging ideas, toys, and software about the Flickr archive
- Fund, collaborate, and co-design ideas and strategies for long-term access and preservation
- Foster development of creative archival practices, malleable content and metadata, and curation situated in the 21st century.
The 100 year plan
We are designing a new institution for the 21st century. One that has a long-term outlook and a desire to affect our global digital commons. How would you write a plan for a 100-year outlook?Find out more
Meet the team
We’re just getting started, gathering a first crew for our maiden voyage. Many folks have helped us come this far, and partners are coming on board. Find out moreOur values
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Calibration & Adaptation
- We seek to inject the idea of freshness and the present into our long-term thinking and contemporary and contextual strategies.
- We expect our mission to be re-evaluated and likely rewritten by agreement every 5 years or so.
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Legibility & Modelling
- We see use and accessibility as pivotal elements of the long-term preservation strategy.
- We want to present working models to demonstrate concepts, approaches, and to give ideas form.
- We will publish progress reports regularly.
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Resolve & Ritual
- We will not be the sole beneficiaries of our work. We must be constantly conscious of the goal for it to outlive us.
- We will develop rituals like the 100-year plan to support the organisation and community as society and technology evolves around the Foundation’s mission over decades.
- Mentorship and memory will be key structural elements of the organisation.
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Friendliness
- This is work for all of us. We want to enjoy doing something bigger than ourselves.
- We are approachable and connected with the wider cultural community.
- We will not presume to know everything.
- We will give generously: models, writing, work, time, funds, storage.
- We will listen deeply as we work to welcome new voices to our mission.
What’s the relationship between Flickr.org and Flickr.com?
We get asked this a lot, so here’s how it works…
The Flickr Foundation is a separate entity, a US 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. It enjoys the permission of Flickr to use the Flickr trademarks, and the Foundation runs its own, independent finances. We are happy to have minority representation from the company on our board – that’s Stephanie McVey, SmugMug + Flickr CFO, and Ben MacAskill (SmugMug + Flickr President & COO, and Flickr.org co-founder) also sits in as a board observer to stay in touch. Minority board representation by the company is written into our by-laws.
You can read Ben’s “Why we’re doing this” blog post, from 2022.
We chat regularly with various groups at the company, like engineering, marketing, and community. The team there have helped us get established, no doubt about that. We genuinely believe it is an act of responsibility for a company to support the creation of a ‘sister nonprofit’ which is able to think on a different time scale that a corporation normally does, also recognising the unique collection Flickr has become.
We are happy to meet with anyone who is interested to talk more about what we’re doing, and offer this in the form of “Unoffice Hours with George” which you can book via our Contact Us page.
Jobs!
Work with us
We are hiring our first crew, seeking long-term thinkers and community builders. It’s a technically challenging environment too, and we’ll need to invent lots of things together.
Pupils of Denishawn School posing for publicity photo from New York Public LibraryImpressum
Governance: The Flickr Foundation is a non-profit organization governed by a board of directors. The board is responsible for setting the organization’s policies and overseeing its operations.
Finances: The Flickr Charitable Foundation is a registered 501(c)(3) organization. All donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. We’re “doing business as” the Flickr Foundation.
Privacy Policy: The Flickr Foundation is committed to protecting the privacy of our donors and website visitors. We will never sell or share your personal information with any third party. For more information, please see our privacy policy.
Copyright: © Flickr Foundation, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Flickr Foundation
548 Market St
PMB 87808
San Francisco, California 94104-5401
USA
EIN: 88-3091608
Phone: +1 (650) 669-8387
Email: hello@flickr.org
Website: https://flickr.org