At the behest of fellow technocracy member John Bell I have finally gotten around to spending a few minutes over at the ISU foundation office talking about how you can give your money to ISU instead of Uncle Sam. Basically, I learned we can do anything we want with donations to ISU and they're very happy to help us give them money. I thought I'd share with all here on what I learned. An endowment is a fund that is pooled with all the other endowments at ISU and put to work on the stock market and other places earning more money. From that money that is earned 5% of the endowments value can be spent by the endowment every year. So if we have say, $30K in the endowment we can spend about $1500 every year on say, a scholarship or merely put it back into the endowment to earn more money next year. Endowments are forever, but they typically want them to be at least $25K in size before they let you spend the 5% earned interest (seems reasonable to me, since anything smaller is almost too small to use for anything). Oh, and if you like you can donate securities in leu of actual cash even and that has some sort of additional tax benefit. You can also opt to spend part of your donation immediately, thereby not putting it in the endowment but making it available to be spent immediately. You could say, donate $10K, with $5k to be spent immediately on whatever it is you wanted, and the rest put into the endowment, and say, do that on an annual basis until the endowment is big enough to sustain the spending you want, etc. Basically anything goes here. Now what started out as a Joke could in fact become a reality if we get enough people or businesses involved. That being the founding of a Open Source development lab and Open Source scholarships here at ISU. While we would need upwards of a half million in an endowment to be practical, it doesn't seem impossible to me to get that much if we had say, 15-20 contributors who donated say, $5K a year for 5 years and maybe a few big corporate donations to top it all off. Sure we couldn't set it up in a year, but compound interest is a wonderful thing eh? Eventually if we had enough money in the endowment we could fund a professorship even. The part I like about it most is that it's forever. Sitting all alone in the Sequent lab programming my ass off on this and that was far better preparation for the "Real World" than sitting in say, "Theory of Computation" or baby sitting 50 people in the 24 hour lab. Certainly better than assembling burgers at Burger King. It seems to me also a novel way to pay for Open Source development. I would wager by and large that most people who do Open Source development are of college age, this seem to be the target group to give money to, in my opinion anyway. Giving scholarships to incoming freshmen who've distinguished themselves by their Open Source programming efforts also seems a mighty fine way to reward them their efforts and get decently intelligent people to walk the halls of ISU's math/CS dept. Who decides who gets what and how the money is spent, well those who donate can decide everything. For scholarships ye who donate the money can decide who appoints the scholarship committee, which does have to be approved by the Office of Student Financial Aid (primarily to insure that distribution of scholarships is all on the up and up as there are apparently limits to how much money can be given to a student if they don't need it.) That person could be the Dean or me or anyone really. You decide what criterion must be met for receiving a scholarship, whether it be for a year, 4 years, if the student is incoming or already enrolled and if they must maintain a specific GPA and remain enrolled in a specific field. And the endowment can be tweaked as we go, because as we get more money in it, we might want to do different things with it. They do want contingencies in the event that say, the CS dept. dissapeared or computers went out of vogue, but that's pretty easy (just assign the money over for general purpose scholarships, etc). Anyway, I'm going to wrap this up. What I'd like to hear are suggestions on what to name the endowment, who all is interested in contributing (and perhaps how much), what it should accomplish, how it should be run, by whom and so on. - Steve