On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Joshua Gatcomb wrote:
I am mostly ignoring the rest of what others have said in this thread because I think it is detracting from your intention of getting money to people to work more. Here is one thing that has frustrated me about TPF. They are a non-profit organization. Yeah, kind of suprising that would be the frustrating thing. The issue is that they can't take money from Bob to give to Sue to work on Bob's widget. This is an extreme oversimplification but in general, they have to abide by the rules that allow them to keep their non-profit status. Where am I going with this?
This doesn't make any sense to me. There's nothing about being a nonprofit that prevents TPF from accepting donations targeted to a specific program. There's a bit of accounting overhead to make it happen, but it's perfectly legal and in keeping with TPF's 501c3 status and its mission.
Regardless if we use TPF or not, I think what will get more people to contribute is having some say as to where there money goes. To that end, I suggest having a list of projects currently being funded. A donator can choose which fund their money goes to or can choose a general fund if they don't care. I don't suggest these projects be generic and nebulous either (though they could be for the same reason a general fund is). In other words, there might be a Rakudo fund - generic. There might also be a fund to fix RT # 31415 which is a Rakudo bug.
I don't object to the idea of targeted donations, nor of having the community be more involved in that targeting. Sounds groovy.
However, I'm not too interested in handing my personal cash over to TPF. I've thought about this for a while, and I'm convinced that for a variety of reasons, TPF should be working on getting most of its funding from corporations. One of the main reasons is simply that there's more bang for the fundraising effort. I can't afford to give TPF $5k, but there's many, many companies using Perl that could easily give $5k or maybe $50k.
over where it went. Actually, it has been years since I have contributed to TPF. Now, I just write a check to the individual(s) I want to help. I don't get the tax write off but I know where my money is going.
I would never do this, because it's not tax-deductible. Also, if you pay them enough (>= $2k, I believe) you'll have to file a 1099 form because they're now a subcontractor for you ;)
Personally, I really think it's important that any money funding Perl work go through TPF. It keeps things tax-deductible _and_ it imposes a higher degree of accountability on the process.
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