[Board] Project Donations

[Dave McIlhagga]

Tyler,

Why do you think it would be inappropriate to collect the 25% fee for  
any size of donation to projects? It's in all projects interest that  
OSGeo have sufficient funding to keep infrastructure in place, help  
with promotion, linkage to local chapters, and all the other  
functions that OSGeo performs. If these things are not of value to a  
project -- they wouldn't have become OSGeo projects in the first  
place. Even having the legal entity in place as a mechanism for  
people to donate to the projects is an important service of value to  
projects.

It seems to me that this is reasonable given the time and  
infrastructure to put these mechanisms in place and maintain them on  
an ongoing basis.

Dave




On 22-Nov-07, at 1:36 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:

> This month I have heard several people talk about the idea of  
> receiving donations on behalf of OSGeo projects.  The only  
> mechanism (correct me if I'm wrong) that we have identified is to  
> receive project-specific donations through the Project Sponsorship  
> Program:
>
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Project_Sponsorship
>
> This is focused on recurring, annual, and fairly large ($500+)  
> levels of donation from companies.  So far, GDAL/OGR project has  
> been the only one using this.  25% of the funds remains for general  
> OSGeo expenses such as marketing, infrastructure, etc. while the  
> remaining 75% is allocated for the Project Steering Committee to  
> spend.  All the funding is managed inside OSGeo bank accounts and  
> financial processes.
>
> This program is not designed to handle smaller personal donations  
> that users may be interested in providing.  In these cases, I do  
> not think it makes as much sense to take the 25% overhead as the  
> potential donations are likely going to be very small.  Also, the  
> donors are not looking for any sort of promotional status, such as  
> being called a Sponsor.
>
> I would like other opinions on how to best handle this.  Perhaps we  
> can set a maximum limit for these donations - i.e. single (personal  
> or corporate) donations of less than $500.  For anything more than  
> that, then the project would be obligated to handle it through the  
> Project Sponsorship methods - including recognising the donor as a  
> Sponsor for the project.  The PSC would still have to choose this  
> option and would be responsible for deciding how the funding would  
> be used, so it doesn't end up being a fee-for-service kind of  
> arrangement.
>
> I can write up a wiki page to describe it in more detail, but it is  
> meant to be a fairly simple idea.
> What do you think?
>
> Tyler
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