Re: Donations to SPI vs associated projects

The SPI donations page at http://spi-inc.org/donations/ currently
says:

> These donations can be made to SPI directly, or they can be marked
> for use by a particular member project. It is preferred that the
> donations be made to SPI, as they can then be used wherever the need
> is greatest. Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular
> project will be distributed to the projects that are currently
> affiliated with SPI as needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.

I'm not speaking for the board now, but personally I disagree with
this policy. I think we should encourage donors to specify which
projects they want to support. They are of course welcome to donate
to SPI to support overall operations, but the preference should be to
support our associated projects. They know best how to spend their
money and donors know best which projects they want to support.

Maybe such a policy made sense when SPI had no reserves, but SPI is
sitting on a healthy cash reserve these days. Also, I'm not aware of
SPI distributing cash to projects, at least not recently. (SPI
supported Conservancy's non-profit accounting project, but that's not
even an SPI member project.)

What do other people think?

--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/

I agree with Martin. What's particularly troubling IMO about this recommendation is that there seems to be no process at all through which projects can submit proposals for receiving funds, and according to which such proposals would get reviewed, evaluated, and prioritized. Until that's in place, there should be a strong recommendation to specifically earmark donations.

-hilmar

Sent from away

> On Jul 12, 2015, at 2:45 AM, Martin Michlmayr <tbm(at)cyrius(dot)com> wrote:
>
> The SPI donations page at http://spi-inc.org/donations/ currently
> says:
>
>> These donations can be made to SPI directly, or they can be marked
>> for use by a particular member project. It is preferred that the
>> donations be made to SPI, as they can then be used wherever the need
>> is greatest. Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular
>> project will be distributed to the projects that are currently
>> affiliated with SPI as needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.
>
> I'm not speaking for the board now, but personally I disagree with
> this policy. I think we should encourage donors to specify which
> projects they want to support. They are of course welcome to donate
> to SPI to support overall operations, but the preference should be to
> support our associated projects. They know best how to spend their
> money and donors know best which projects they want to support.
>
> Maybe such a policy made sense when SPI had no reserves, but SPI is
> sitting on a healthy cash reserve these days. Also, I'm not aware of
> SPI distributing cash to projects, at least not recently. (SPI
> supported Conservancy's non-profit accounting project, but that's not
> even an SPI member project.)
>
> What do other people think?
>
> --
> Martin Michlmayr
> http://www.cyrius.com/
> _______________________________________________
> Spi-general mailing list
> Spi-general(at)lists(dot)spi-inc(dot)org
> http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general

On 07/11/2015 06:45 PM, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
>
> The SPI donations page at http://spi-inc.org/donations/ currently
> says:
>
>> These donations can be made to SPI directly, or they can be marked
>> for use by a particular member project. It is preferred that the
>> donations be made to SPI, as they can then be used wherever the need
>> is greatest. Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular
>> project will be distributed to the projects that are currently
>> affiliated with SPI as needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.
>
> I'm not speaking for the board now, but personally I disagree with
> this policy. I think we should encourage donors to specify which
> projects they want to support. They are of course welcome to donate
> to SPI to support overall operations, but the preference should be to
> support our associated projects. They know best how to spend their
> money and donors know best which projects they want to support.
>
> Maybe such a policy made sense when SPI had no reserves, but SPI is
> sitting on a healthy cash reserve these days. Also, I'm not aware of
> SPI distributing cash to projects, at least not recently. (SPI
> supported Conservancy's non-profit accounting project, but that's not
> even an SPI member project.)
>
> What do other people think?
>

I think we should keep the policy and actually do what it says.

jD

--
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PostgreSQL Centered full stack support, consulting and development.
Announcing "I'm offended" is basically telling the world you can't
control your own emotions, so everyone else should do it for you.

On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 08:52:20AM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> I think we should keep the policy and actually do what it says.

I agree that would be an improvement, but at least this part of the
policy is too vague to be useful for donors:

>> Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular project will be
>> distributed to the projects that are currently affiliated with SPI as
>> needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.

- What are the criteria for deciding on the "and/or"?
- How would money be distributed among projects?
- What does it mean "as needed"?
Etc.

I think SPI should just let donors decide to which affiliate project
donate; serving those projects is the main reason of SPI's existence
after all. If SPI needs to increase its own funds, the way to go would
be to increase the cut the organization takes from incoming donations to
affiliate projects. If that is needed to keep up with the current
workload and/or increase the quality of services, I'm sure affiliates
will not object.

Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack(at)upsilon(dot)cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader . . . . . @zacchiro . . . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

On 07/12/2015 12:24 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 08:52:20AM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> I think we should keep the policy and actually do what it says.
>
> I agree that would be an improvement, but at least this part of the
> policy is too vague to be useful for donors:
>
>>> Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular project will be
>>> distributed to the projects that are currently affiliated with SPI as
>>> needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.
>
> - What are the criteria for deciding on the "and/or"?
> - How would money be distributed among projects?
> - What does it mean "as needed"?

I think this is thinking a bit hard about it. Determining that criteria
really should be a board decision and it could change. Take the
following example:

Let's take Debian and PostgreSQL and let's assume they both have 5000.00.

Debian says, "Hey board, we want to run DebConf but we are short 2k".
PostgreSQL says, "Meh, we are good until next Winter".

The board at that point can determine if it is a worthwhile investment
into Debian.

The reason this works (or at least I know this works) is that is how
PostgreSQL does it. PostgreSQL waits for a request or creates a request
and then makes a decision based on that request. A request can be
created by the project/person in need or by a person who sees a
project/person in need. The SPI board can do the same thing.

Now I do agree that there has to be some guidelines and PostgreSQL does
have some of those:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/SponsorShip

But we are in now way limited by that.

> Etc.
>
> I think SPI should just let donors decide to which affiliate project
> donate; serving those projects is the main reason of SPI's existence
> after all.

Actually it isn't.

http://spi-inc.org/corporate/by-laws/

Gives are actual purpose. The affiliated projects are part of that but
in no way limited or the primary purpose. The affiliated project
framework just happens to be the default, mainly due to lack of
resources IMO.

> If SPI needs to increase its own funds, the way to go would

Based on Article Two of the bylaws we absolutely need our own funds.

An idea I have floated a few times is to have a FOSSFest. Now affiliated
projects with financial means (Debian, PostgreSQL, LibreOffice etc..)
would be asked to help but SPI would be the primary driver of such an
event and would use primarily SPI funds.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

--
Command Prompt, Inc. - http://www.commandprompt.com/ 503-667-4564
PostgreSQL Centered full stack support, consulting and development.
Announcing "I'm offended" is basically telling the world you can't
control your own emotions, so everyone else should do it for you.

I agree completely.

-hilmar

Sent from away

> On Jul 12, 2015, at 8:24 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli <zack(at)debian(dot)org> wrote:
>
> I think SPI should just let donors decide to which affiliate project
> donate; serving those projects is the main reason of SPI's existence
> after all. If SPI needs to increase its own funds, the way to go would
> be to increase the cut the organization takes from incoming donations to
> affiliate projects.

On 13 July 2015 at 05:24, Stefano Zacchiroli <zack(at)debian(dot)org> wrote:

> >> Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular project will be
> >> distributed to the projects that are currently affiliated with SPI as
> >> needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.
> - What are the criteria for deciding on the "and/or"?
> - How would money be distributed among projects?
> - What does it mean "as needed"?
> Etc.
> I think SPI should just let donors decide to which affiliate project
> donate; serving those projects is the main reason of SPI's existence
> after all. If SPI needs to increase its own funds, the way to go would
> be to increase the cut the organization takes from incoming donations to
> affiliate projects.​

How about a middle-ground: let people donate to SPI, but if there are more
funds in SPI's bucket than are needed for overhead, let the SPI membership
vote on which projects the funds go to.

Benefits:
- people can donate to SPI in general without an earmark and still have
their money go to productive places (eg, smile.amazon.com can send a cut to
SPI, but doesn't provide earmarks AIUI)
- there's more value in being an individual member of SPI
- there's more value in being an SPI associated project
​ - the 10% cut of earmarked donations is no longer just for overhead, it's
for supporting other SPI projects too
- potentially it provides a way for SPI to support a project without it
going through all the rigmarole of being an associated project?

​Cheers,
aj​

--
Anthony Towns <aj(at)erisian(dot)com(dot)au>

Martin Michlmayr <tbm(at)cyrius(dot)com> writes:

> I'm not speaking for the board now, but personally I disagree with
> this policy.

I agree with you.

Bdale

On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 12:21:14PM -0600, Bdale Garbee wrote:
> Martin Michlmayr <tbm(at)cyrius(dot)com> writes:
>
> > I'm not speaking for the board now, but personally I disagree with
> > this policy.
>
> I agree with you.

Likewise; I believe it's much better that donors decide which project
their money should go to rather than SPI taking that role. We've had
past donations explicitly to SPI and there's nothing stopping people
continuing to do that if they wish to support SPI overall.

J.

--
] http://www.earth.li/~noodles/ [] "Reality Or Nothing!" -- Cold [
] PGP/GPG Key @ the.earth.li [] Lazarus [
] via keyserver, web or email. [] [
] RSA: 4096/2DA8B985 [] [

It seems both the secretary and chairman hold this view, so who am I
to disagree.

Still, I do have a question and a comment:

I assume this opinion takes into account the plans to hire outside
help for accounting etc work?

If the SPI is sitting on an unnecessarily large pile of cash, a simple
way to get it spent would be to distribute it out to projects (as
suggested by the text shown to donors) is simply to divide the in the
same ratio as how much earmarked donations each project has received
in the previous fiscal year. (E.g. Debian and Postgres would get the
most, etc...) The rationale for this suggestion is that this roughly
correlates with the size and activity of each project, and assuming
that projects spend all of their income, also correlates with their
expenses.

My suggestion can of course be combined with an application based
method of distribution too. That would create a priority order for
spending the funds:
- cover SPI needs first
- distribute money for special project needs based on applications
- share the rest to all, weighted by each projects earmark.

(For disclosure, I'm still the liaison for drizzle, and I don't think
we received any donations in the year just completed, so would not
benefit from the proposed scheme.)

henrik

On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 4:45 AM, Martin Michlmayr <tbm(at)cyrius(dot)com> wrote:
> The SPI donations page at http://spi-inc.org/donations/ currently
> says:
>
>> These donations can be made to SPI directly, or they can be marked
>> for use by a particular member project. It is preferred that the
>> donations be made to SPI, as they can then be used wherever the need
>> is greatest. Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular
>> project will be distributed to the projects that are currently
>> affiliated with SPI as needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.
>
> I'm not speaking for the board now, but personally I disagree with
> this policy. I think we should encourage donors to specify which
> projects they want to support. They are of course welcome to donate
> to SPI to support overall operations, but the preference should be to
> support our associated projects. They know best how to spend their
> money and donors know best which projects they want to support.
>
> Maybe such a policy made sense when SPI had no reserves, but SPI is
> sitting on a healthy cash reserve these days. Also, I'm not aware of
> SPI distributing cash to projects, at least not recently. (SPI
> supported Conservancy's non-profit accounting project, but that's not
> even an SPI member project.)
>
> What do other people think?
>
> --
> Martin Michlmayr
> http://www.cyrius.com/
> _______________________________________________
> Spi-general mailing list
> Spi-general(at)lists(dot)spi-inc(dot)org
> http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general

--
henrik(dot)ingo(at)avoinelama(dot)fi
+358-40-5697354 skype: henrik.ingo irc: hingo
www.openlife.cc

My LinkedIn profile: http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/henrik-ingo/3/232/8a7

On Sun, 12 Jul 2015, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On 07/12/2015 12:24 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> >- What are the criteria for deciding on the "and/or"?
> >- How would money be distributed among projects?
> >- What does it mean "as needed"?
>
> I think this is thinking a bit hard about it. Determining that
> criteria really should be a board decision and it could change.

Considering that SPI has some reserves now, why don't we try this
process out before changing how SPI has traditionally collected
donations?

If the procedure works, and there are people willing to use it and drive
it, great. That would be an appropriate time to change the donation
procedure or at least suggest that people donate directly to SPI because
it is funding appropriate projects with community oversight.

If it doesn't, then we haven't built up a pool of money which has no
clear purpose.

--
Don Armstrong http://www.donarmstrong.com

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or
daring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But
the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer
to achieve immortality by not dying.
-- Terry Pratchet _The Color of Magic_

I probably have some useful expertise to share on this thread, speaking
less as a mundane SPI member, but more from my day-job at Conservancy.

Conservancy and SPI are very close in the core of what we do, although
we do it very differently (which is good -- it gives projects two very
different options for similar services).

Conservancy does a *lot* for our member projects (what SPI calls
associated projects), including helping them fundraise. Thus, we have a
good sense of what projects can typically raise. Some of our projects
raise a lot of money each year ("lot" is of course relative, but a lot
compared to the throughput of the average SPI or Conservancy project).

We take 10% of donated funds to our general fund, as opposed to SPI's
5%. Even so, Conservancy's annual budgeted amount is only about $40k
from that revenue source. That's barely enough for one low-level
staffer in the USA, esp. when you factor in benefits.

I admit that in the mid-200s, we initially thought the 10% would
ultimately cover staffing Conservancy, because we hoped project would
raise millions, and there'd be enough to run Conservancy. Ultimately,
there just isn't that much money in community-oriented Free Software
projects. That's not a bad thing of course -- Free Software projects
are great at doing a lot with just a little moeny -- but it informs this
decision SPI is trying to make:

Ultimately, I suspect SPI will never raise enough from 5-10% from your
associated project donations to fund the administration work for the
project. Thus, you *will* need to seek outside funding, one way or
another as a long term solution.

(BTW, as a short term solution, Conservancy is already in discussions
with various executives of SPI in the hopes that we can share more of
our know-how and resources to ease SPI's administrative burden. I hope
those talks will be fruitful, and Conservancy is excited to help bolster
SPI a bit if we can.)

But, as it stands, SPI should start thinking now about how it's going to
raise enough funds to at least get one staffer long-term to handle
administrative work.

Finally, it probably sounds like I'm arguing that SPI shouldn't
fundraise for its projects -- but I'm not arguing least. Rather, what
I'm arguing is that you might want to consider doing what Conservancy
does:

Generally speaking, Conservancy encourages our projects to put up
donation mechanisms for themselves on their own websites, but
Conservancy's own fundraising on its own website is generally just for
Conservancy's general fund, with a small comment indicating that
donation buttons for member projects can be found on those projects'
websites. e.g.: https://sfconservancy.org/donate/

I think it's a reasonable compromise for SPI too. It seems not too far
off either from what's already being done at
http://spi-inc.org/donations/ ... the addition would be giving
associated projects buttons to use that auto-direct to their project.
--
-- bkuhn

On Sat, 11 Jul 2015, Martin Michlmayr wrote:

> The SPI donations page at http://spi-inc.org/donations/ currently
> says:
>
>> These donations can be made to SPI directly, or they can be marked
>> for use by a particular member project. It is preferred that the
>> donations be made to SPI, as they can then be used wherever the need
>> is greatest. Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular
>> project will be distributed to the projects that are currently
>> affiliated with SPI as needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.
>
> I'm not speaking for the board now, but personally I disagree with
> this policy.

Agreed.

It is notable that this statement is somewhat contradicted by the
Associated Project Howto, which states:

"In either case, it is important that the donor designate that the gift is
to go to the project. If a gift arrives without a designated project, the
Treasurer will attempt to contact the donor, and if unsuccessful will
place the money in the SPI general fund."

This has certainly been my expectation and I believe is also consistent
with current practice.

Speaking for myself as always.

Cheers,

Rob

--
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Web: http://www.spi-inc.org
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