[openbeos] Re: "One Hour for Haiku" - Coordinating Voluntary Cash Donors
- From: Simon Porter <hailstorm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:52:08 +0000
Hi Michael,
Thanks very much for replying. Comments below..> Simon Porter wrote:> > I was
going to email Michael off list but I feel it better to keep> >
comments/discussion on here.> > > > I wanted to request comments on the
following from Michael.> > > > - Would it be possible to add a subscription
button on the donations> > page for paypal? As you mentioned it would be a
quick thing to set up. > > Yes. Like is said, prior, I thought that this was
something that you could > set up yourself via PayPal. We will add this
shortly.> > > - Koki mentioned Haiku Inc has a board of directors, three
including> > yourself. Would you mind saying who these other people are? > >
Me. Everyone else has become inactive. We had some internal discussions > about
adding more people, but it really didn't go anywhere. The biggest > issue
was/is that I would like a BOD that is fairly balanced. Right now, we > have
very few contributors who are not devs. I love devs. I am a dev, at > least at
my paying job. But I think that we need other (business/marcom, > legal, etc)
representation. OTOH, there is a lot of concern around inviting > people to
Haiku who are new, or at least, don't have a lot of knowledge and > vested
interest.
I seem to get the feeling it is a bit of a chicken and egg situation in that
unless the project grows then it is difficult to find such people, but if you
don't then growing the project becomes hard.
As you point out trust is also an issue. I would expect that to sit on the
board of directors you would have to be well known and trusted by the
community. At the moment these people nearly all developers.
I'm not sure I follow your description about the board of directors though. Do
you mean to say there was originally 3 but they have since become inactive or
has it always been just yourself? Would it be worth putting out a request for
additional board members?
> > - Hugo mentioned having people elected onto the board much like Gnome> >
> > does.> > Would you be open to having someone elected to deal with
> > financials? It> > would take the burden off yourself and give more prompt
> > access to> > financial information.> > The biggest issues with financials
> > are:> 1) Disparate information sources. I have bank statements, paypal
> > account > info, Network For Good info and receipts. Putting all of that
> > together is a > manual process.> > 2) There isn't anyone else who
> > can/will/should do it. They would have to be> a) generally trusted by the
> > community> b) have a background of some sort in business/accounting> c)
> > have time and interest in doing the work> > 3) Honestly, we don't spend a
> > whole lot of money. We have two basic reasons > to spend money:> a)
> > translate dollars to lines of code> b) spread the news about Haiku> > We
> > have pursued both of those with varying success. The problem is that >
> > doing either really big requires a big investment. Hiring someone full time
> > > for development, for example. Taking out an ad in the London Times. Our >
> > efforts have been much smaller so far and our successes have been smaller.
> > > SCALE was not terribly cheap, but I think that it was worth it. We bought
> > a > new computer for a developer whose old one was not usable any more.
> > Also > worth it. But that is most of what we have done this year.
Although its been on the small scale in the past I don't see why the project
shouldn't be more ambitious and make a bigger push for donations. My personal
interest would be to see the project more able to fund paid development work. I
thought it was great to have Axel work full time on the project for the couple
of months that he was paid.
I don't know if it is the case with Network for Good but with Paypal you can
get financial information using Paypal's API. That would be one way of getting
a more real time update of donations without requiring you to manually get
these figures all the time. I would be happy to look into this, although I
suspect it would only be of use for getting info on donations through Paypal.
Regards,
Simon
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