A few clarifications on this excellent conversation from a long-time Apache Member perspective:
Harbs <harbs.li...@gmail.com> wrote earlier: > My thoughts: > > Conceptually, I like the idea of donating to projects (and in our > case Flex). The direction of Apache seems to be moving to a more > project-centric approach like we’re seeing with ApacheCon. That makes > sense to me in general as Apache has grown quite a bit and > diversified a lot in recent years. Large companies have business > units with funds earmarked for them, and it seems logical for > projects to have a certain level of autonomy in terms of justifying > their own existence. (I’m not saying that every project needs to be > “profitable”, but it also should not be shackled because it’s owned > by the foundation.) The ASF's mission is to provide software for the public good. We do that by hosting like-minded project communities. As long as there's a community to provide oversight for a project, we'll host them. There's really no thought of "profitability" ever in ASF thought. (I think everyone here knows that, but for the archives I wanted to provide that reminder.) Separately, the "Apache direction" is... not a thing. The ASF is here for our projects. It's great to see a number of projects wanting to do more - like for ApacheCon - and in particular, being *serious* and following through on that kind of organization. > Having earmarked money which has a foundation tax seems like a > win-win to me. In all likelihood, project-specific donations will > increase over-all donations to the foundation which could be very > good to projects in particular and the foundation as a whole. Either > way, it seems to me like a worthy experiment. We're at a point where we're looking for new fundraising ideas that still fit with the Apache Way and that will actually work with the all volunteer-led governance the ASF and our projects use. If I had to give general advice, it would be 1) focus on getting interest for your project, then worry about the rest, and 2) work on getting organized and *consistent* project volunteers who will keep the work going on. A lot of past efforts here (or in infra) have fizzled when everyone +1'd great ideas, but rarely showed up over the long term to actually do the work. > > However, the details seem like they are pretty sticky: 1. How would > these donations handled for a financial and technical perspective? Don't worry about finances, that's an ASF corporate question - to start with, look at the directed funding proposal from the past President's report in a board report. > 2. How are decisions made on how to spend the money? For technical perspective, the PMC needs to come up with your own plan on how to ask for, and in particular how to use any per-project funds in a way that is fair and transparent how spending decisions are made. > 3. What would be the guidelines on what is a “kosher” expense? Whatever the PMC can consistently justify as furthering the goals of the project. There will be a few specific restrictions that the ASF is likely to impose, but beyond that it's up to the PMC. One of those rules might be not paying for donation of core development services *for the normal coding work of the project itself*. That is, building new Flex modules or fixing bugs should come from people donating their time and code, not by paying them. > 4. Practically, what expenses do we have that would benefit from earmarked > donations? > 5. Could donations be given with the expressed desire for it to be > used for a specific purpose? (i.e. if Acme company wants to invest > in better docs for a project, is that okay?) That's mostly up to the PMC. Note that the details at this level rely on trust between the PMC and the donor(s), not legal agreements. > 6. Would recognition for donations be allowed? (i.e. company logo on > a project homepage for donations above $XX) That's a question for fundraising@ which we'll work on when a project comes forward with a likely donor. The issue is ensuring that formal recognition on project pages doesn't harm the overall Sponsorship program, which needs to be clearly separated from this. ...snip... On Feb 10, 2017, at 11:46 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote: ...snip... > My reasons for spending time on this are several. > 1) The ASF is growing and so are expenses. Expenses rarely change based > on the economy, but donations can. If a time ever comes to discuss > cutting expenses, I want to protect Flex by being able to make a case that > we don't cost the ASF any money and in fact, help. > 2) We should be donating money to the ASF, but how many of you do? I > don't myself. And would it be easier to justify if the money went > directly to Flex? It would for me. I don't donate personally, because I spend so much of my own unpaid time working on Apache governance: my job has been wholly unrelated to ASF work for a dozen years. And I don't think we should ever get to the point where committers somehow feel pressured to donate cash. That being said, I agree: we should make it much more obvious and easy for people who *do* want to help out with cash. 8-) > 3) I am currently paying for one of our CI servers. If we could get > directed donations to pay for it, we might be able to upgrade to a faster > server. I would personally donate more since I would get a tax break on > the donation. And anyone who wants to pitch in can help and at least in > the US, get a tax break. > 4) There are certain resources we share in the ASF like JIRA that are not, > IMO, optimally set up for us. We can't create custom JIRA fields, for > example. And more than one person has tripped over the Infra-centric > buttons on each JIRA issue. > 5) I, and I think several board members, want to understand if handing off > more server responsibilities to the project would scale to other projects > and help the bottom line or hurt it. This is a complicated infra question, since it also affects infra staffing and procedures. Not to say it can't happen, but it's a larger conversation that depends on what specific plans the PMC comes up with. > > Next Steps: > > I have already gotten tentative approval from the board to pursue this > idea. I've received plenty of words of caution from the various > directors, including Infra, but nobody has said "don’t do it". > > > First, we need to discuss this a bit more and decide if we as a project > want to do it. I can't just present it myself. We have to have a vote. > Then we would present the vote-approved proposal to the VP Fundraising. > Then we'd have to actually try to implement it. At any step we could get > blocked. It may turn out to be too difficult to get our own bank account > under the ASF umbrella that we would need for the donations to be > considered as going to a non-profit org. Or nobody will donate and we'll > abandon the idea. Or the cost of accounting for these small donations > will be considered to high. Microsoft may not accept payments from that > bank account for its Azure server. You don't *have* to have a vote, but it's a simple way of showing broad PMC consensus and support. And yes, the big question is if you have a specific plan that has broad support (and volunteers to make it happen). But ideas like this are *absolutely* a great thing to pursue! (Also: don't worry about bank accounts; fundraising@ and Treasurer would handle those details on behalf of the whole ASF. Of course, that does add slightly to overall ASF costs...) It's great to see the discussion here! -- - Shane https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources
