Xuropa offers FEL free exhibition space

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 04:29:58PM -0800, James Colgan wrote:
> > == Donation feature ==
> > 
> > Xuropa's cofounder proposes a "donation" paypal feature for which
> > they will take a percentage of it. I'm ok with it. My question is,
> > is Fedora Board you ok with it ?
> > 
> > They would then collect funds and wire to "us" 85% of the proceeds
> > after expenses (paypal's and hardware and license costs).  This
> > may not be very much to start, but it will build over
> > time. However, if we are lucky, I guess we will get $100.
> > 
> > I nominate MaxSpevack to be in charge of all money transaction,
> > since he manages Fedora's budget already. IF we do happen to get
> > lucky, maybe it would be nice to use "Fedora Scholarship" to get
> > more contributors to FEL :)
> > 
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Scholarship
>  
> >A couple concerns:
>  
> >* The donation feature should let people know before they finalize
> >any payment exactly what percentage is going to Fedora.
> 
> >* Is it possible that such a donation feature may be more trouble
> >to track than it's actually worth?  Can we do the site *without* a
> >donation feature?
>  
> We can definitely state the percentage of the donation that goes to
> FEL prior to the donation being made.  While the Online Booth has
> been presented without this donation feature I think that it would
> be beneficial for all that we work it into the model in the future.
> 
> As to how much will be generated, to be honest we won't know until
> we try it out.  However, it will help us to cover ours and FELs
> costs.  Later on, once we have moved to a different infrastructure,
> we hope to support FEL within an Online Lab.  We'd like to make this
> available at no cost to FEL, but again, we have costs that we'd like
> to be able to recover if possible (we're a small company ourselves).
> So I'd like to understand how we can make this all easier for us all
> from an accounting perspective and to enable FEL to begin to grow
> some operating budget from these efforts.  I'll check the
> scholarship link above.
>  
> Is this the first time that an open source project within Fedora has
> worked with donations?  (I've seen it done with other open source
> and collaborations, the most well known being Mozilla
> http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html)

Mozilla, as well as some other open source groups, have the
distinction of being run by 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundations, whereas
Fedora does not.  In fact, we can't, at least in the USA, because we
get most of our operating budget from a single source, Red Hat.
However, we do have a partner NPO in the EMEA region, the Fedora EMEA
e.V. group, which might make this process less onerous.

The amount may be small enough that this doesn't present an enormous
problem for tracking or accounting, but the precedent is one of no
little interest to the Board, I'd think.

> Any guidance from the board here would be greatly appreciated.
>  
> In the meantime, we're looking forward to Chitlesh and the community getting
> the Online Booth in place and building the community.

James, thank you for all the interest you've shown in Fedora and the
FEL.  We are eager to discuss this further and I look forward to
hearing thoughts from some of the other Board and community members.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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