Wow. What an amazing response! I'll try to address the points raised as best I can, if I miss anything important please let me know and I'll try to address it as well. I'm only human :)
These are the responses to the sponsorship questions. Please see the other posts for responses to a theme and hp.o. > Habari has so far been created and supported by people who seek no gain other > than the satisfaction of helping and I don't want to see that change. Which is one of the things that I love about Habari and OSS in general. There are still bills to be paid, we're just offering to take care of it. > If money is tight, there are other ways to raise the cash. Sure. At the moment it's Owen's credit card. We're just offering to take care of it. > imho a note of thanks is quite a bit different than a cash-for-credit > exchange, and there is no such note on the main page of hp.o. If you can't > tell, I don't like the way this was approached. A company that makes a > donation of time and money would likely be thanked anyway, so why go about > discussing reciprocation beforehand... oh, right ;) With regards to our approach, we have approached this how we have approached other sponsorship arrangements in running events previously. Both Will and I have run large events with corporate and private sponsors (~200k AUD) and traditionally (in AU at least) the easiest way to approach it is to be up front about everything. That's why we're offering sponsorship, not a donation; they are seperate things. We already donate our time to other aspects of the Habari project (as many many others do). We will continue to do regardless of the outcome of this conversation. > Indeed i think we were seeing an attempt at transparency and good faith on > their part. Exactly where we are coming from. > Sponsorship creates a body that, in coldflame/luke's own words[1], acts as an > authority figure[2] to Habari Project. Hold on... We don't want an authoritative relationship. We want to be friends :). That's why we tried to be clear about the reciprocal arrangement. We didn't say, we'll give you money if we get cabal membership, or the ability to direct the project, we said "We'd love to have some link love from the major Habari Project sites (hp.o, trac, etc), and credits somewhere for the financial sponsorship." > As it appears now, acceptance of this sponsorship implies that the community > receives financial support for hosting and agrees to engage Squareweave in > the redesign process described above -- and that rejection of the financial > support (and lack of a link-back) would cause disinterest in creating a new > theme for -extras. I'm assuming that this pork-barrel appearance is > unintentional and that, in fact, there are three separate ideas on the table. They are indeed three separate offers, in no way tied to each other (except for the fact that they are all offered by us). We would like to offer each of them equally and separately. I tried to identify this in the initial proposal; sorry I didn't do a very good job :P. As you suggested, I have split them into three posts. > Having said that, I am not interested in financial support on a monthly > basis. If we are to receive sponsorship for the project, it must be on an > annual basis, not a monthly/bi-annual/etc basis Sure. We'd prefer this too. > We use a 1G slice from Slicehost, recently tuned by a bunch of people to > perform as well as it does now. We currently use 17G of 38G storage, and > have used 4.8G of 400G transfer this month so far. The base slice cost is > $70US per month. > The slice includes a regular weekly and daily backup plan at an extra $10 per > month. Total yearly costs: $960. Thanks for your clarification Owen. It's good to know how much we are offering :) With regards to Legal entity, this is something we had thought about too. It indeed would be easier for us (and also more beneficial from a tax perspective) to donate to a body. However we know that this is a hairy issue. We're happy to pay the hosting bill (or whoever takes care of the hosting bill) in the interim while the body is set up. We're happy to take the risk that a body will get set up eventually, with the worse case for us to be the loss of $~1k. Once again, as a business, we are prepared to take this risk. > In regard to year donation vs small contributions, that "full year only" > stuff is a load of crap. Plenty of people could contribute a few dollars to > the fund, regularly or not, and that could take a small bite out of our > overall costs and be more in our community spirit. If a contributor can't > direct where the money goes, then there's no reason to pay for "a year of > hosting". That's illogical. Sure. If you guys feel this way, we will not be offended by the rejection of our offer. > In regard to link love for donations, I'd be ok with a donors' page, but I'm > not sure about footer or even more prominent links, since this opens up more > uncomfortable questions. For example, if there are multiple donors, do they > all get footer links? This would be something for the community to decide. We don't have a problem with sharing space in proportion to sponsorship. From our point of view, we'd love to be the tinyest link everywhere, completely swamped by other sponsors. If this is the case, it's because the community is getting a whole lot of cash / sponsorship, and a whole lot of people are putting real weight being Habari. > <Matt Read's comments re Gil Read Memorial Foundation> Thanks for your input on Canada's situation. In AU, it works a little differently. In terms of benefit, the only benefit that we get is that it counts as an expense for us. Which means we get the same benefits as if it were a new computer, monitor, or hosting for ourselves. Unless Habari became a not-for-profit body in Australia, this would not change. Indeed the relationship that you describe with your sponsors is in the same vein as what we are offering. Once again, this is an offer of sponsorship, not a donation. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to habari-dev@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to habari-dev-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/habari-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
