On Mon, Sep 24, 2018 at 3:35 PM William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 24, 2018 at 6:12 AM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > > On Sunday, September 23, 2018 at 1:18:50 AM UTC-4, rjf wrote: > >> > >> I assume that other research universities work about the same as at UC > >> Berkeley. Anyone can donate money to a professor's research activities > >> with a designation something like "to support Prof X's research in the > >> area of ABC". It is monitored by the university, but such "various > >> donors" > >> funds are typically more flexible than (say) money from a federal > >> contract, where budget categories like "hardware" and "travel" may > >> be more rigidly defined. Perhaps the concept here is mostly an > >> alternative name for > >> "The various donors fund of Prof William Stein, for research in some field > >> of mutual interest" > >>>> > >>>> > > > > As far as I can tell things have always been used specifically for > > Sage-specific activities. Now that CoCalc is essentially doing the Sage > > booth, perhaps it would not be appropriate to use Sage Foundation funds to > > fund that booth, but in the past that was a very appropriate use (if I > > understand the nature of the current booth correctly, which I may not). > > The booth tends to be about three things: > > - Sage > - CoCalc > - the Univ of Washington math grad program > > See attached picture from the last booth, which has the CoCalc and Sage > banners. > People come by and often talk with us about Sage, get Sage stickers, etc. > Prospective grad students often start asking me about UW. > Of course people also talk with us about CoCalc too. > > Nobody is paid from Sage Foundation money to be at the booth -- Sage > foundation > just pays for some travel expenses and the booth rental. If you > genuinely think it would be > better for Sage for us to not have the booth at all, let me know, and > I'll consider > cancelling it, since it's a lot of work to travel and be exhausted day > after day by > questions... > > > For reference to newcomers, in the past there was discussion of setting up a > > "proper" Sage Foundation under US (or other) nonprofit law but William ... > > More specifically, two years ago, I talked with a competent lawyer who > advised me that setting up a not-for-profit for a software project > is a complete nonstarter with the IRS these days. That wasn't the > case in the past, > but it was in 2016. I'm personally not going to pursue this further. > If somebody > else wants to, the community will I hope be supportive of their effort.
I would suggest, rather, seeing about applying for Sage to join the NumFocus organization: https://numfocus.org/ That always seemed the obvious thing to me, but maybe I'm missing something. However, once I did learn that the Sage Foundation is a thing that exists, it seemed at least less necessary since we were already getting that kind of support from UW. But if we ever lose that, that would seem the way to go. And I believe there has been an effort started recently to establish a NumFocus organization in Europe as well, IIRC. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.