[VisCom de] Re: [OSGeo-Board] Re: [Fundraising] Re: [OSGeo-Board] Re: [Fundraising] RE: [OSGeo-Board] German OSGeo Chapter formation, bank account

[Arnulf Christl (CCGIS)]

On Mon, August 21, 2006 21:00, Markus Neteler wrote:
> On 8/21/06, Arnulf Christl (CCGIS) <arnulf.christl at ccgis.de> wrote:
> ...
>> There are basically two reasons why I want to have a separate
>> banking account. The first is that we need to put community money that
>> has
>> come out of the German conferences to good use. We (the FOSSGIS
>> conference
>> team) have decided to put this money into OSGeo. The second reason is
>> that
>> every time you shove money accross a border it loses value. The smaller
>> the amount the less it makes sense. So the easiest thing is to set up a
>> separate Euro account. If this is a big thing for OSGeo management and
>> results in a costly overhead we will do it differently. We can found a
>> small association with a bank account and then apply for an association
>> with OSGeo. Same thing other way round.
> ...
>
> Let me add another core issue: If we want to make people *donate*
> money, we should try to enable them to donate it *tax-exempt*.
> Obviously European people cannot donate tax-exempt to an US corporation
> and vice verse. So it makes sense to have local (here: national) chapters
> which are tax-exempt *in their countries*.
>
> In  Germany it would be an e.V., in Italy an ONLUS and so forth.
> Michael Tiemann was mentioning exactly this issue with (non)donating
> money to the R Foundation, an Austrian corporation:
>
> http://logs.qgis.org/geofoundation/%23geofoundation.2006-02-04.log
> " 08:04:09  	tiemann:  	I tried to give money to the R project ( in
> Austria ) and there's no tax-free way to do so. They didn't want to
> bother creating a US 501( c )3. I think it's an unsolved problem ( to
> do international tax free ). Orgs like WWF have US-based entities for
> US tax free and global for others."
>
> To me it makes much sense to collect/keep the money in a first
> approach within the individual chapters/countries.
>
> Markus

There is a GRASS Verein eV. We might consider transferring the money there
and get them to "be" an OSGeo Local Chapter. This would also be grease to
the GRASS Incubation process.

Regards,