[Deganawida-sysadmin] Fun with Finances

[christopher mitchell]

hey all

not sure who all is on this list, let me make a quick intro.  I'm christopher, 
I was active with the Zero server group helping to run dadaIMC.  I'm from St 
Paul, Minnesota, work sometimes with the twincities IMC but am focusing 
energy right now on purely tech stuff (and intramural soccer)

The Zero server was hosted at a colo facility and cost money - so we needed to 
brainstorm ways of raising money to pay for those recurring fees as well as 
one time costs such as new hard drives n such as they came along - unless 
Brian was going to keep buying them out of pocket, which quite frankly would 
have worked for me =)

So anyway, I thought the results of that brainstorm could be applied here to 
this group, or perhaps a larger group.  There was one major difference 
between that group and this one, that group had one person local to the 
server - so we were looking for a financially distributed solution as he 
didn't want to do all the work.

Basically our options were
1) someone gets a bank acct for the group
2) form a coop and get a bank acct
3) no bank acct, someone just collects the money 
4) become a non-profit project sponsored by UC-IMC which happens to be a 501c3

I think those were the options - perhaps someone can add to them.

At any rate, I thought the best option was 4 because people could donate 
easily, tax deductible, via postal mail or online.  In addition, UC-IMC takes 
care of the books and all the information that goes with being tax deductible 
while charging a 5% rate on all donations that come through - those proceeds 
go to IMC projects anyway so it isn't too bad in my opinion.  

We have already spoken of upgrading dega, we could use a 100 base T hub, and 
I'm sure there are other things for which money would be useful to the 
project.

If people are willing, I think it would be good to encourage IMCs who are 
hosted on dega to make contributions when they are able to a dega fund that 
will be held by the UC-IMC and disbursed when we need new hardware or 
whatever.  

I think voluntary contributions are best, on the order of whatever the IMCs 
can handle.

Thoughts on this?  If people are generally willing, we will need to pick a 
name for the project, ask UC-IMC to sponsor us, and pick a liason who will 
deal with UC-IMC on behalf of the group.

Obviously, this is just a suggestion at this point, but I tend to think that 
they sooner we make decisions like this, the better. 
thoughts?


-- 
--christopher mitchell
--GPG ID: 8B73AFD0 on keys.indymedia.org

I think, therefore I am. - Descartes
Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am. - Paul Valery
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: signature
Url : http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/deganawida-sysadmin/attachments/20030811/b8245176/attachment.bin