Dear all, First, if you are reading this then thanks for sticking with us :-)
FYI, yesterday the Board convened for a meeting. We actually used video and voice, and despite a nervous Chairman, one member struggling to decant his home brew beer, another with a recalcitrant mobile phone, and a few friends and family popping in to wave and say hi, it was generally conducted in a professional and friendly fashion. It was a great opportunity to put names to faces, and personally I felt much closer to people for seeing them. Tony is frantically writing up minutes, but as he was up at about 4 am his time to prepare for the meeting, and then worked a very long day, my guess is they may be a day or two in coming. Just shows the level of commitment from people though. I won't spoil his glory by spelling out all the discussions ! Suffice to say that we got some boring but necessary legal paperwork agreed, and had some good discussions on current development and finance. Some good news is that v8.1 with all current updates rolled in, and v9 Beta 1, will be in a mirror near you very soon ! Please see Ians post on these. *We also want to keep banging the drum about finances.* If you want this to work, then you need to donate. Either in your time, or some money. We want to be completely independent and self funding, but we are at least USD 25,000 p.a. or more away from that right now, and in reality probably double that. It doesn't take much. If every server stuck its hand in its pocket for USD 10 per year, we would be in a great position. Who can't afford that ? Don't look the other way and assume someone else will do it instead of you. Remember it's Open Source, not necessarily Free Source :-) We are going to try and make it more obvious as to how and where you can donate, and hope that this will increase donations. In the first instance you can pay via the donate button in the forums. That way you get a nice shiny supporters badge to show that you DID donate. Wear it with pride :-) It's easy to do - don't put it off until tomorrow or tell us you are too busy installing SME boxes to be able to do it : http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?action=profile;area=subscriptions or http://wiki.contribs.org/Donate Note we are in the process of migrating to the new PayPal account, but either way the money will get to us and enable us to build you a better SME. If you want a receipt from us, or want to wire money directly to our account then please ask. I am sure we can get you a forum badge if you would like one :-) I believe we now have a really strong base from which to work. The Board do all have different points of view, but fundamentally we all want the same thing, and I feel that we are all prepared to work hard towards it. There are going to be disagreements and arguments along the way, and compromises to be found, but such are the ways of democracy ! One thing for sure is I know that the community has the best team it could have working on their behalf, and again, I am proud to be part of that team. B. Rgds John Chairman Koozali Foundation Inc _______________________________________________ Discussion about project organisation and overall direction To unsubscribe, e-mail [email protected] Searchable archive at http://lists.contribs.org/mailman/public/discussion/
