[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Fundraising

[Landon Blake]

I stole the following snippet from another of Paul Ramsey's posts. I
thought it belonged in a separate thread:

Paul wrote: "Having a plan to take better advantage of our host nation
status. We pay a good deal in terms of administrative overhead to be a
fully tax-exempt charity in the USofA, what fund raising plans have we
linked to that status?  Is that status gaining us anything at all, at
this point?  The only connection I have *ever* heard was Michael Tiemann
saying he'd only contribute if he could get a US tax write-off."

I've never seen any type of fundraising plan. Do we have one? If we want
to take advantage of our tax-exempt status do we have a list of American
companies that might be possible contributors and might also be
interested in a tax write-off? Do we need to assemble a team to handle
fund-raising efforts? After all, I'm sure that Tyler has his hands full
with the Journal and other items...

Another thing I've been curious about is how any funds raised will be
spent or dispersed. I know we need to pay Tyler's salary. What other
things do we need to pay for? Do we help fund the FOSS4G conference? Do
we fund work/infrastructure for specific projects?

I'd like to learn more about this. I think a web page geared towards
potential contributors with a concise explanation of how duns are spent
would be an aid to fundraising efforts, if we will ever have any.

Landon

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Paul Ramsey
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 9:20 AM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Chickens, Boards and Export Restrictions

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:56 AM, Arnulf Christl
<arnulf.christl at wheregroup.com> wrote:
> But instead, she incarnated in the US, the
> most backwater place imaginable wrt Open Source.

So, this raises two actions items:

- Putting our policy online (presumably copied from Apache
shamelessly) in a findable location, to conform to the legal norms of
our host nation.

- Having a plan to take better advantage of our host nation status. We
pay a good deal in terms of administrative overhead to be a fully
tax-exempt charity in the USofA, what fund raising plans have we
linked to that status?  Is that status gaining us anything at all, at
this point?  The only connection I have *ever* heard was Michael
Tiemann saying he'd only contribute if he could get a US tax
write-off.

Both these actions items fall to you, Tyler, could you give us an
update?

BTW, one of the things at Refractions that made tasking more visible
for "go do this" roles, like the sysadmin, was entering absolutely
every request and job into Trac before fulfilling it.  Does anyone
thing a OSGeo trac would help or hinder? It might get a little stuffed
up with irrelevancies, but it would at least raise the visibility of
"things that need to be done". I assume SAC is already running one of
their own?

P.
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