Greetings one and all, In short: Below is a proposed annual budget. Feedback, comments, questions, ...., are encouraged. In long: In the past years, Haiku, Inc. has relied upon good faith donations from community members. Now, with Haiku's first release: R1/Alpha 1, we have begun to organize a yearly budget to help identify our costs and to provide a clear incentive to donate. We have now reached a pivotal point and you, the community can help to further Haiku, more than ever before. At a minimum, Haiku Inc. currently needs to raise $1,000 USD every year. This pays for domain name renewal and for the recently acquired dedicated server, which hosts several of Haiku's websites. Thanks to this funding, Haiku's internet presence is top quality and this is a very high priority. Once those funds are earmarked, there are several events throughout the year that can benefit Haiku, in terms of immediate development results. One of the most well known coding events is the week following BeGeistert, during which the developers are working with each other in person practically round-the-clock. Many great improvements and bug fixes are committed during coding events. Money provided for these events is used to assist in paying for the location of the event, accommodations, and travel fares. This past year, a few of the core developers started doing mini-code sprints over the weekend. These are fairly low cost events, with supplementing developer's travel fees as the primary cost. Also important to the project is increasing the community of users, testers and developers. A very effective method of doing this is to attend conferences, trade shows and exhibitions, where people are often exposed to Haiku for the first time and get to see it hands on. In addition to casual attendees, several well known people in the FOSS world get to speak with project representatives and see how Haiku is shaping up. This can often be an opportunity to strengthen our networking among FOSS advocates and other projects. These shows can also be an opportunity to locate commercial interest in Haiku. While many of the current shows Haiku attends occur in the west coast United States, several also occur in the EU, such as RMLL, FOSDEM, etc. We would like to be able to provide reimbursement costs for individuals attending, and pay for show expenses (registration fees, booth fees, and related items). In order to support conference and trade show presence, marketing supplies is another area that needs occasional funding. Hard goods, such as banners, presentation equipment, and fliers increase the visual appeal and effectiveness of Haiku at trade shows. Many of these items can be purchased and reused for several years, or purchased in bulk and distributed to several individuals attending different shows at different times. Another group of expenses we would like to officially endorse, is purchasing items used for the development process. Examples would be hardware for writing new drivers or debugging existing ones, technical documents purchased from standards organizations, etc. We hope to also be able to provide developers with replacement hardware in the event of the inevitable failures that occur. $1,000 Domain renewal and dedicated servers *see below $1,000 Formal coding sprint -- following BeGeistert $1,500 - North America Shows $1,000 - EU Shows $600 Informal mini-coding sprints $300 Developer Purchases $100 Marketing ------------------ Total Expected Budget: $5,500 / yr Regarding the approximated costs alloted for "Domain renewal and dedicated servers", $100 is for domain renewal. $900 is for the dedicated server, which is currently Hetzner. The first month was slightly under $250. Each additional month is $65. So while the actual cost is closer to $800, a buffer is being reserved for possible increases due to exchange rates or other unforeseen fees. As reassurance, any excess money can be applied elsewhere as needed. From past experience and some initial feedback these are the items that Haiku Inc. would like to finance. We welcome and encourage the entire community to make suggestions for improving this list, adding additional items, or otherwise modifying it. In the reasonable future, we hope to publish additional financial information, such as past financial reports, a summary of our current assets, and account balances.