[OSGeo-Board] Re: [Fundraising] Re: [OSGeo-Board] Re: [Fundraising] RE: [OSGeo-Board] German OSGeo Chapter formation, bank account

[Markus Neteler]

On 8/21/06, Arnulf Christl (CCGIS) <arnulf.christl at ccgis.de> wrote:
...
> There are basically two reasons why I want to have a separate
> banking account. The first is that we need to put community money that has
> come out of the German conferences to good use. We (the FOSSGIS conference
> team) have decided to put this money into OSGeo. The second reason is that
> every time you shove money accross a border it loses value. The smaller
> the amount the less it makes sense. So the easiest thing is to set up a
> separate Euro account. If this is a big thing for OSGeo management and
> results in a costly overhead we will do it differently. We can found a
> small association with a bank account and then apply for an association
> with OSGeo. Same thing other way round.
...

Let me add another core issue: If we want to make people *donate*
money, we should try to enable them to donate it *tax-exempt*.
Obviously European people cannot donate tax-exempt to an US corporation
and vice verse. So it makes sense to have local (here: national) chapters
which are tax-exempt *in their countries*.

In  Germany it would be an e.V., in Italy an ONLUS and so forth.
Michael Tiemann was mentioning exactly this issue with (non)donating
money to the R Foundation, an Austrian corporation:

http://logs.qgis.org/geofoundation/%23geofoundation.2006-02-04.log
" 08:04:09  	tiemann:  	I tried to give money to the R project ( in
Austria ) and there's no tax-free way to do so. They didn't want to
bother creating a US 501( c )3. I think it's an unsolved problem ( to
do international tax free ). Orgs like WWF have US-based entities for
US tax free and global for others."

To me it makes much sense to collect/keep the money in a first
approach within the individual chapters/countries.

Markus