[Board] Legal Entities for OSGeo

[Daniel Morissette]

On 12-11-13 3:48 PM, Peter Batty wrote:
> 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?
>

Our revised 2012 budget contains notes about the current project fund 
balance held by OSGeo at the bottom of the spreadsheet, see:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/File:Osgeo-budget-2012-revised-20120809.pdf


More specifically, we're looking at an accumulated amount of about 
21,500$ between the GDAL and OpenLayers projects, and there has been 
very little activity (less than 5k$ worth) in the last year... the exact 
balance for each of the two projects is still to be sorted out with each 
project due to some discrepancies in the accounting history.

There is also the GRASS project (Markus) that has been thinking about 
joining the project sponsorship program, but I have kept them on hold so 
far.

Unfortunately, the project sponsorship program is essentially dormant 
and not working very well at the moment. If we got rid of it (after 
finding a way to return the money to each project) very few people would 
notice. OTOH if a champion wanted to bring it back to life that could 
potentiall become a great asset for OSGeo and its projects.


>
> 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?
>


I'm not too worried about that. Our FOSS4G program is much more 
scientific / educational than other conferences, it is a core part of 
our educational mission and I think the IRS recognized that, or is 
trying to confirm that since they requested a copy of our conference 
program (number/list of talks, etc.)

Daniel