Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

2014-05-22 Thread Jeff Fortin
Le lundi 19 mai 2014 à 11:19 -0700, Jim Nelson a écrit :

 Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s)
 would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances?  (Or
 do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this
 goal?)

I tend to think that corporate donations are desirable for many reasons.
I doubt I need to go at length here to point out that a handful of corps
with marketing/charity/RD budgets are easier to target and convince
than a thousand individuals working hard to earn every penny, that GNOME
needs an ecosystem that includes not just hobbyists but also people who
are paid to do maintenance professionally, and so on and so forth.

I don't yet have a magical answer for an easy new funding model for
GNOME (if it was so easy, there wouldn't be any problems to fix), but as
part of my duties I would like to brainstorm and explore new venues.
Just from the top of my head:


- Check the possibility for grants from public institutions and look
into corporate sponsors from outside our traditional circles, instead of
limiting ourselves to our current corporate ecosystem.

- Humble Indie Bundle-style in-app-store donations system, though
there was some legal/technical problem with that idea, I forgot which,
maybe someone here remembers? Otherwise I ought to ask hughsie again.

- Online services for individuals

- Out-of-the-box fundraising schemes. We might have some surprises
there. However funny that might sound at first glance, I've seen golf
tournaments (and other event types) providing massive amounts of funds
to some non-profits.

- Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story

- Untapped potential, like the privacy fundraising initiative

- Other fancy ideas that may arise

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Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

2014-05-22 Thread Sriram Ramkrishna
Hiya Jim!


On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Jim Nelson j...@yorba.org wrote:
 Hello everyone,
 Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would
 you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances?  (Or do you feel
 these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?)

Corporate sponsorship tends to bring in a lot of money in and it is
always beneficial to be able to increase that.  If you wanted to do
grass roots based fundraising, that would require setting up a better
donation system than we have now.  We can definitely do better, and
the board has had some discussions about alternative systems last
year.

Some people have suggested using flattr or some other method of
micro-payments that could bring in revenue.  I think I threw out
something about tying donations to bug fixes.  You could setup
marketing calls to various companies who might be using our stack and
ask for donations that way for smaller amounts like 1000 dollars or
5000 dollars.

In general, they do okay, but they won't be very large.  You need to
grow the audience to really take advantage of that strategy.

Another idea might be to take advantage of funding opportunities like
grants from the government or companies.  We don't necessarily have to
make a technology argument, we could focus on programs like OPW or our
underlying philosophy of freedom.  We are after all a philanthropic
organization, we could make that argument.  Here is a grant
application from JP Morgan as an example:

http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Corporate-Responsibility/grant-programs

Of course this one is corporate, but I'm sure we can find others.

Another idea is to fundraise at conferences, and not necessarily our
tech ones.  Most of fundraising is about making 1:1 connections and
then making a compelling argument.

sri




 -- Jim

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Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

2014-05-20 Thread oliverp
On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 23:08 +0200, oliverp wrote:
 On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 11:19 -0700, Jim Nelson wrote:
  Hello everyone,
 
  
  My questions for the candidates is:
  
  
  Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s)
  would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances?  (Or
  do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this
  goal?)
 
Good question, thanks for asking.

I think the first priority for the Board must be to focus on stabilizing the 
current sensitization. 
make sure invoices are paid for the OPW etc. 

Then I think much work can be done together with the community in both
areas you mention (corporate sponsorship and personal donations). Long
term, more methods can be considered. 

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Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

2014-05-20 Thread oliverp
On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 10:48 +0200, oliverp wrote:
 On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 22:02 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:
  I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual 
 donations than we are doing right now. We have a product that is naturally of 
 interest to a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of interest to 
 hardware and application developers to be compatible with. We also have 
 technology that is of interest to people to build their own products with or 
 create services around. When it became known that the GNOME Foundation was in 
 a difficult financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of 
 individual donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very 
 supportive of GNOME. I think we should aim to increase how much we get in 
 private donations, and we can do that by reporting to our donors how their 
 money is being used and having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to 
 dedicate our fundraising energy to these two sources because they are 
 complimentary to the goals we have for advancing our technology. As a 
 Foundation, even with an ED, we have 
 lim
  limited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most 
 effectively.
 
 
  I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative 
  founders which has informed some of my views on it.
  http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source
That is a great article thanks for sharing! The Engagement Team have started a 
discussion [1] about how the Foundation
can become more effective in the fundraising, and as part of that effort
set-up a wiki page [2] with some resources on the subject (have added
the post it to the wiki). 

I hope you are interested in joining this effort, the Engagement Team
want to collaborate closely with the Board in this.

1https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2014-April/msg00052.html
2https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FriendsOfGNOME/HowWeCanImprove

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Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

2014-05-20 Thread Emily Gonyer
In my previous email responding to Kat, I touched on this very
subject. First and foremost we need to determine two things: 1) How
much money we are currently spending on what, and what is truly
needed. 2) How much money is currently coming in, and from where -
this should be broken down into categories - individual donations, and
at least the top 5-10 corporate donors ought to be listed along with
how much they have been and are giving.

Then we should move on to determining how we can raise donations from
individuals and small businesses. Donors should not have to search the
website to figure out how to do so - a small, but prominent link to
'Contribute to GNOME!' would not be out of place on the site.
Currently it takes at least 3 clicks to arrive at a site where you can
donate - and your only choice for doing so is via paypal. Why don't we
accept other payment options? Is it just that nobody has bothered to
set it up? If that is the case, we should be asking for help doing so.
At the very least, we should accept payments from google, facebook and
amazon, and we should at least consider accepting bitcoins as well.

Finally, there are other funding options available online - a quick
search reveals numerous websites with ideas on how to more effectively
raise funds. Utilizing every tool available to us to raise money from
individuals should be our first priority. Only after we have fully
explored these options should we go back to asking for yet more
corporate money.


Emily Gonyer

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:28 AM, oliverp oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 10:48 +0200, oliverp wrote:
 On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 22:02 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:
  I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual 
 donations than we are doing right now. We have a product that is naturally 
 of interest to a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of interest to 
 hardware and application developers to be compatible with. We also have 
 technology that is of interest to people to build their own products with or 
 create services around. When it became known that the GNOME Foundation was 
 in a difficult financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of 
 individual donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very 
 supportive of GNOME. I think we should aim to increase how much we get in 
 private donations, and we can do that by reporting to our donors how their 
 money is being used and having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to 
 dedicate our fundraising energy to these two sources because they are 
 complimentary to the goals we have for advancing our technology. As a 
 Foundation, even with an ED, we have
  lim
  limited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most 
 effectively.


  I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative 
  founders which has informed some of my views on it.
  http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source
 That is a great article thanks for sharing! The Engagement Team have started 
 a discussion [1] about how the Foundation
 can become more effective in the fundraising, and as part of that effort
 set-up a wiki page [2] with some resources on the subject (have added
 the post it to the wiki).

 I hope you are interested in joining this effort, the Engagement Team
 want to collaborate closely with the Board in this.

 1https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2014-April/msg00052.html
 2https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FriendsOfGNOME/HowWeCanImprove

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Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

2014-05-20 Thread David King

Hi Jim

On 2014-05-19 11:19, Jim Nelson j...@yorba.org wrote:

Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s)
would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances?  (Or
do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this
goal?)


I think that corporate donations are an effective way to raise funds for 
the Foundation, as they traditionally have dwarfed personal donations. 
While personal donations are secondary in terms of absolute value, the 
sheer number of individual donors is an indication of the high level of 
support from a wide range of people.


Perhaps there is room for a middle ground, where interested parties 
(individuals or companies) could contribute to specific goals, and 
interested maintainers or contributors could pick up tasks and work on 
improving GNOME based on the goal ideas. To me, this is somewhere 
between the current fundraising campaigns, such as those for 
accessibility and privacy, and the idea of bug bounties. I think that 
the idea might have too much overhead, but it could work well at getting 
both new contributors and donors involved in the project.


I am sure that there are lots of potential problems with it, but I hope 
the idea can spark some discussion.


--
http://amigadave.com/


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Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

2014-05-19 Thread Tobias Mueller
Hi.

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:19:37AM -0700, Jim Nelson wrote:
 Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) 
 would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances?  (Or 
 do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this 
 goal?)
Reducing costs; although I think it is quite obvious that you cannot spend 
money 
that you don't receive.
I see potential in various areas, such as our Friends of GNOME 
programme, the travel budget, or the people we pay for GNOME related work.
Right now, we ship donors' gifts from the US.  That's probably not the most 
economical option, esp. when sending things to our European donors.
We could scale down travel support or have a policy that covers, say, up to 80% 
by default.
Also, while we need committed people to do work for us, I'm not entirely
convinced that we need to pay a salary.  We could try to get committed community
members to take over responsibility before thinking of hiring someone to do it
for us.  I don't think we can scale down much further now, though ;-)

As for sources of income, I think we need to make it attractive for people
to give (personal) donations first, before thinking of scaling up or expanding 
in other areas.  That includes being able to receive money via something 
not Paypal or reaching out to our donors and tell them what we've done with the 
money they gave us.

Cheers,
  Tobi
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Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

2014-05-19 Thread Marina Zhurakhinskaya

- Original Message -
 From: Jim Nelson j...@yorba.org
 To: Foundation List foundation-list@gnome.org
 Sent: Monday, May 19, 2014 2:19:37 PM
 Subject: Questions for the candidates: finances
 
 Hello everyone,
 
 First, I'd like to voice my support for Dave Neary's question. I also believe
 finding an executive director may be the most important task for the
 incoming board.
 
 From some earlier discussion it sounds like the other defining task will be
 stabilizing GNOME's finances. Others have asked questions about improving
 the foundation's financial situation, but almost every response is about
 locating more corporate sponsorship and increasing personal donations. My
 concern is that those paths are well-trod and potentially lean, and that
 novel ways of financing should be explored. At least one candidate (Emily
 Gonyer) stated a desire to ween GNOME off of corporate sponsorship.
 
 My questions for the candidates is:
 
 Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would
 you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances? (Or do you feel
 these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?)

I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual donations 
than we are doing right now. We have a product that is naturally of interest to 
a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of interest to hardware and 
application developers to be compatible with. We also have technology that is 
of interest to people to build their own products with or create services 
around. When it became known that the GNOME Foundation was in a difficult 
financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of individual 
donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very supportive of 
GNOME. I think we should aim to increase how much we get in private donations, 
and we can do that by reporting to our donors how their money is being used and 
having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to dedicate our fundraising energy 
to these two sources because they are complimentary to the goals we have for 
advancing our technology. As a Foundation, even with an ED, we have lim
 ited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most effectively.

I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative 
founders which has informed some of my views on it.
http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source

Thanks,
Marina

 
 -- Jim
 
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