Donations, putting your money where your mouth is
From Open Progress
In many organisations with many volunteers, there is often a discussion on what the available money needs to be spend on. An issue is that there is typically a greater need for money that what is available. It then becomes an issue of priorities. Given that in collaborative organisations people choose what they want to do, it makes sense to allow people to influence the priorities by allowing them to fund those goals that are in line with the objectives of the organisation.
[edit] Who wants to influence spending
Basically there are four groups of people:
- Those who spend their time and effort in the projects, they may be editing, developing or organising.
- Those who like to contribute to the projects and have little time, money or ability.
- The users of our projects; they may be not heard much but they are the ones we do it for.
- Trolls
[edit] What we could do with more funding
- We could throw more tin at problems (ie hardware and bandwidth)
- We could pay programmers to develop specific things that do not get programmed while there is a need.
- We could spend money at our presence on computer shows and other marketing related activities.
- …
[edit] How do we get our money
- We get money by donations through funding drives.
- We get money from affiliated organisations
- We get money through grants
- People can give us more money, if the money given is tax-deductible
[edit] How do we get time spent on our projects
- People program, edit because they love our projects. They do it for free
- Organisations use MediaWiki for their own use and contribute code, sometimes content, back to the community
- We can ask or pay people to do things that we think important. This could be programming a particular bit of missing functionality, it could be to record 50.000 pronunciations of words in Tumbuka for use in OmegaWiki (you can replace this one for something to do with your pet-project).
[edit] How can we get funding for particular projects
OmegaWiki will contain Wikis for Professionals. These will start off as people and organisations interested in a specific domain. At some stage there will be a need for specific functionality. This may be to include taxonomical data with species. As a consequence there may be collections of data that these communities want imported. This requires funding either in money or in time.
The upshot of this is, that money does talk. In this way it is large donations that have the biggest impact because they do target the money that they give. Small donators do not have this possibility while they have so far been the biggest contributors to OmegaWiki. This scheme is to emancipate them and get these projects under way as well.
[edit] Functionality programmed by organisations
When an organisation uses MediaWiki, they may find that certain functionality is missing. They may have their own developers, they may hire contractors to do the work for them.
The result of this work is:
- The organisation keeps it to himself and in essence forks (this is legitimate)
- The organisation can contribute the code to the MediaWiki project. This code can be incorporated or rejected.
This is in essence another way in which money talks; there is little we can do about it or want to do about it. It is basically yet an other argument why we should emancipate our small financial contributors and give them the power to spend their money where their mouth is.
[edit] How to use small contributions
There will be two fixed parts to any donation. There is a minimal sum that goes to the Stichting, this is to ensure the running of the organisation, The rest is "make me happy" money and is either targeted or will be used for the development and the sustainability of the projects.
The foundation indicates projects that need funding in time and money that it supports. These will be projects that ARE approved and that help the Stichting achieve its stated aims. The need for approval has everything to do with legal and fiscal aspects.
Practically people that give say EUR 1000,- will find that their money is now in the "make me happy" category. This is money for the Stichting to spend. When we then have other categories, people can within a set period, earmark their money to specific projects. All contributions that are not earmarked within this time-frame will be deemed to be in the "make me happy" category. This will allow people to put their money where there heart is.
[edit] What to do with valued contributions
When there is a particular project that has money earmarked to it, and someone has done the biz, he or she is entitled to this money. For instance a programmer has developed some functionality that is thought to be worth EUR 5000,-. We have the money and he has programmed the functionality. The functionality is there, tested approved and taken into production.
So if someone is entitled to EUR 5000,-. It is then up to him what he does with this money. If he so chooses, he can have it paid to him. He may have to pay income tax on this money. He can also choose to use this money within the Open Progress organisation for a project that he favours.
[edit] What to do with projects that do not qualify as tax-deductible
When we have a specific project that because of local laws does not qualify as tax-deductible, we state that the project is NOT tax deductible and, it is up to the person to decide to give it to this project anyway or keep his money in the "make me happy" category. It is up to him to spend his money and earmark it according to his intentions.
[edit] Why we need to be open to money issues
With the ever increasing need from the word wide web and the increasing content of our projects the amount of money needed to make our projects possible will grow steadily. This proposal aims to keep us in control; it is the Stichting that specifies the categories people can earmark money to. It is the person who donates the money, effort and decides what it will be spend on.
When a category has dependencies, it is obvious that money available for this category can be spent on the dependencies as well. When a category is oversubscribed in money, it will return to the "make me happy" category.
[edit] How to help with money
We have a Dutch bank account; transfers of money within the EEC are gratis.
