[Board] Project Donations

[Frank Warmerdam]

Markus Neteler wrote:
>> Let me back up - one discussion I had with Markus pushed me to
>> consider how we could better help the projects on this front.  The
>> one example I'm thinking of is related to QGIS.  Apparently there is
>> an effort somehow related to the Italian Chapter to collect funding
>> for squashing QGIS bugs.  (Markus can correct my mistakes in this
>> statement)  It seems that some donors want 100% of their donation
>> going toward particular project goals, so the Project Sponsorship
>> angle isn't palatable.  How this aligns with the QGIS PSC, I am not
>> sure.
> 
> Here is the QGIS example:
> http://www.cofundos.org/project.php?id=55
> 
> also a PostGIS one:
> http://www.cofundos.org/project.php?id=46
> 
> In my opinion it is basically a communication problem. People
> may think (I am guessing here) that their 25% OSGeo tax are
> taken to feed the Ed or someone else. 

Markus,

I agree we need transparency on how money is spent. I think we
see some frustration with opaqueness in posts like Howard's recent
blog post:

   http://hobu.biz/2007/11/21/what-has-osgeo-done-in-the-past-year-or-two/

Hopefully we can address this in part with an annual report,
which will need to include financial details.  But would it
be wrong if the OSGeo portion were used to feed the ED?  We
have an ED because we think it is critical to the operation of
the foundation.  The ED needs to be paid.

 > It needs to be better
> communicated how the money is used (see recent Mozilla
> Foundation issue [1]). We are not in this situation but need
> to avoid it from the beginning. There are many possibilities
> to do it the right way and to avoid that people try to bypass
> OSGeo (especially without asking us for explanations or hints).

It is not my intention that OSGeo inserts itself in the loop for all
money collected and spent around our projects.  If folks want to use
a site like cofundos.org to collect and distribute monies for a project
then that is fine.  I'm not really clear what you mean by "to do it the
right way".

Note, despite all this, I can live with the idea of project sponsorship
funds being collected and held strictly for the projects needs instead of
applying an OSGeo support portion.  If the general use percentage is seen
as significantly impeding our ability to collect otherwise willing funds for
projects then we should just do away with the concept of a 25% general use
amount.  Managing project monies would then be a pure service OSGeo offers
the projects and we would need to collect money for our various needs in
other ways.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org