Another alternative might be to actually set up an educational 501c3 and do
it as an organized charity. I'm on the board of a Makerspace and we ended
up doing this. We sent in our paperwork to the IRS in August and received
our determination letter in October. It wasn't too bad. For organizations
with < $50,000 in funds changing hands every year, the yearly Form 990 tax
form is literally an "e-Postcard" type form once you have your
determination.
This would be some more work up-front (I can share all the things we went
through in my organization to make that happen) and there would need to be
a board of directors/officers for organization (I see enough active members
of the community between the ECB and S100 sides to fill these positions),
but it would solve all of the paperwork issues by making it an actual
tax-exempt entity. Selling boards @ cost in support of the mission would
be an allowable thing for a 501c3 to do, and people could donate extra
beyond the cost of boards and get tax deductions for it.
Anyway, that would be another way to go.
Personally, I'd like to have a solution that increases the availability of
the S-100 boards for new people to get into a working system (although the
new S-100 Utility board seems poised to get the needed boards for a serial
terminal system down to 2 boards) and solves the issues Andrew L is seeing
with PayPal. Having members of the community get their own board batches
built and distributed is another option, but I kind of worry about that
breaking down into chaos (who revises the designs? who keeps track of
revisions? etc). There are a couple of boards I would like to have on
both the ECB and S-100 sides of the fence that I might do my own 5-board
I'm also willing to take on getting batches of some boards made and
distributed, mainly ones that don't need any revision, if it helps Andrew L
focus on the ones that need revisions.
Andrew
On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 12:33:30 PM UTC-8, pbirkel wrote:
>
> If I understand the situation correctly, and I'm certainly no financier,
> it seems as if the only issue is the *volume* of payments that Andrew
> receives. That could be avoided if:
>
> 1. For each new board, appoint a fund-collector ("czar"). Not Andrew.
>
> 2. PayPal to fund-collector. When they have accumulated the necessary
> amount they either send a single PayPal to Andrew or send a personal check
> (or other fund transfer mechanism).
>
> Andrew sees a *lot* fewer incoming fund transfers. And doesn't have to
> worry about the funds-incoming tracking.
>
> Assuming that fund collectors rotate, then each would only see 1/Nth the
> amount of fund-transfers that Andrew does currently, and then serve in that
> role maybe 1-2 times per year, assuming that N > 6-10.
>
> Andrew doesn't place a board-order until he receives the aggregated-fund
> transfer. The aggregator presumably trusts Andrew, and each of us trust
> the aggregator.
>
> Not quite as simple as now, but not particularly more complicated either.
> And *maybe* it also offloads a bit of the work from Andrew. It certainly
> ought to reduce the volume of incoming funds transfers for Andrew by a
> factor of more-or-less 20 (a SWAG on my part). That ought to satisfy
> PayPal. Or there are personal checks and avoid PayPal entirely/mostly for
> the second leg of the fund transfer?
>
>
>
>>
>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"N8VEM-S100" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
