Richard,
That's great news! (The time to get an answer wasn't an issue per se, but whether and when any answer at all might be forthcoming, especially given the previously expressed concerns and doubts of others that a positive answer would likely result. Under such conditions, it would be pointless to wait in the dark for 3, 6, 9, or whatever more months, instead of pursuing other options.) For purposes of earmarked development grants, does TPF prefer and recommend http://www.thepoint.com/ to channel earmarked donations to TPF? Or would it be best to wait a little longer for more conclusive TPF discussions on this? In this context, 2 specific cases of interest from past discussions are: (1) Getting 10 $500 commitments to fund chromatic's proposed month of intensive Parrot project work. (2) Providing a means to arrange (some number of) monthly contributions to fund ruoso's proposed work on SMOP's runtime. Once the means to handle these 2 paradigm cases is in place, a lot of useful work could be handled by replicating these cases with suitable substitutions of numbers, people, and tasks. I am certainly interested in helping with setting this up, if there's something useful I can do. (And of course, once this is set up, I am still interested in soliciting donations along such lines.) Best regards, Conrad Schneiker www.AthenaLab.com <http://www.athenalab.com/> Official Perl 6 Wiki - http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6 Official Parrot Wiki - http://www.perlfoundation.org/parrot From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Richard Dice Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2008 6:29 PM To: Conrad Schneiker Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Fundraising follow-up Conrad, Regarding targeted, earmarked funding - I have investigated the legalities, tax implications, etc. of what is involved. The result of my investigation is that it is do-able within the construct of TPF. The other question is one of creation of a technical platform for implementing this. There is a discussion within TPF of how we might accomplish this, or how it might otherwise be accomplished. For instance, one member of TPF pointed out that http://www.thepoint.com/ already exists and could provide the necessary infrastructure. So if the goal is (and only is) to connect Perl 6 developers with funding collected from various sources piggybacking off of this site could be the easiest way. My concern and the concern of TPF is maximum and best possible support of Perl, including Perl 6, given our resource limitations. I try to direct my time to what can be best accomplished in that context. This particular matter has received considerable attention, but so have other matters in the past 6 weeks as well. It seems to me that you too are energetic in your support of Perl 6 and have capability in this regard. If there is a project that you think you can devote attention to in such a way that the likelihood of success is maximized while not incurring the trouble of having anyone else on the critical path of the project plan then I would not want you to feel encumbered by TPF or anyone else. I think the main thing that TPF can offer is a legal structure: we have experience in meeting world-wide tax code requirements (as various countries will look upon grants of this kind as being income), and we have experience dealing with Things Going Wrong, including legal council identified and retained, insurance policies, limited liability of directors of the corporation, and similar. These things are important in Real Life and they are difficult and costly to replicate. Something I would ask you to consider is that 1.5 months _is not_ a lot of time, _especially_ for a volunteer organization. If that isn't going to work for you then I understand; there's a lot to be said for individual JDFI, which can be very efficient. But it doesn't scale into certain realms. Maybe this is one of those realms, maybe it isn't. The plan currently under discussion within TPF is the one written up by Richard Hainsworth on March 11, with body beginning "Richard Dice covered some crucial questions below." I will email Karen Pauley, the new TPF Steering Committee chair, with your email address. If this matches the kind of program you are interested in then maybe you could be the "implementation volunteer" on the TPF version of the project? Cheers, - Richard On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Conrad Schneiker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: **** Pleases direct follow-ups to just perl6-users. **** It's been about a month and a half since the first time that I brought up the topic of fundraising. So I want to find out what the prospects are of decisively resolving the earmarked funding issue within The Perl Foundation any time soon. Otherwise, I would like to take the initiative to set up a Parrot Platform Foundation specifically to handle earmarked grants for Rakudo, the Parrot VM, C6PAN, and any other Perl 6 projects of interest, such as SMOP. (I want to avoid using Perl in the Foundation's name, to avoid any confusion with TPF.) I know that others have differing strong opinions and grand visions on how they want things to be done. That fine. In the mean time, I want to pursue several more modest and presently-available opportunities for supporting Perl 6 developers, which are presently falling through the cracks. TIMTOWTDI. You know what I want for Christmas. The clock is ticking. Best regards, Conrad Schneiker www.AthenaLab.com Official Perl 6 Wiki - http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6 Official Parrot Wiki - http://www.perlfoundation.org/parrot
