[Board] Legal Entities for OSGeo

[Peter Batty]

Thanks Daniel. Can you give us a rough idea of how much money we've
contributed to project sponsorship over the last couple of years or so?

On conference sponsorship, at least as far as the Denver event went, all
that money went to another organization (GITA in that case), though we
(OSGeo) ended up receiving some proceeds from the conference, so got some
of that money indirectly. It will be the same sort of setup for Nottingham
in 2013 too. I don't know if that makes any difference but wanted to
mention it just in case.

Would our conference activities potentially be seen in a similar light to
project sponsorship, as you could argue that FOSS4G competes with other
geospatial conferences run by private businesses?


On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Daniel Morissette <dmorissette at mapgears.com
> wrote:

> BTW, for everyone's benefit OSGeo currently has three types of fund
> raising activities described at
>
> http://www.osgeo.org/**sponsorship/opportunities<http://www.osgeo.org/sponsorship/opportunities>
>
>
> 1- Fondation sponsors is fine for a nonprofit 501c3 if we treat them as
> donors and only thank them in a "thank you" page with their logos (a
> minimum change of terminology in the website would fix this)
>
> 2- Project sponsorship is not acceptable for nonprofit 501c3 because that
> is a taxable activity that competes with private businesses. That is why a
> new taxable subsidiary would be required to manage this if we continue it.
>
> 3- Conference sponsorship falls in a grey area. As long as we treat the
> sponsors as donors and only thank them with their logo then we're fine.
> However if the sponsors get a 1/2 page ad in the conference program or a
> booth then that part of the sponsorship amount (corresponding to
> 500-1000$?) is not a donation, it needs to be treated as "unrelated
> business income (UBI)". A nonprofit can have a maximum of 15% of its
> revenues in UBI (you may also have to pay taxes on that UBI income).
>
>
>
> On 12-11-13 3:27 PM, Daniel Morissette wrote:
>
>> Hi Cameron,
>>
>> I'm not sure I understand this part of your response:
>>
>> On 12-11-13 3:17 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> For purposes such as fund raising, I think we should be working with
>>> sister organisations, be they an OSGeo local chapter, LocationTech, OGC,
>>> or something else.
>>>
>>>
>> Fund raising, i.e. donations are acceptable for a 501c3 nonprofit. It is
>> also okay to have a "thank you" page on our website to thank our donors
>> and showing their logos.
>>
>> What is not acceptable is advertizement for our sponsors, i.e. any kind
>> of marketing talk/ads posted on behalf of the sponsors in our website or
>> conference program. Advertizement is bad, thank-you-logos are acceptable.
>>
>> For this reason I believe all our existing fund raising activities (i.e.
>> foundation sponsors) are fine, they may just need a bit or terminology
>> changes. Being able to deal with money is the main benefit of getting a
>> legal status, so if we have to go through sister organizations for fund
>> raising as you suggest then that defeats the point of getting a legal
>> status in the first place.
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Daniel Morissette
> http://www.mapgears.com/
> Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000
>
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