regarding the use of SPI to accept donations... if you are going to provide this service you are going to need a few policies in place first. There is a bunch of paperwork to deal with and also there might be some guidelines to determine which projects that SPI would act as "fiscal sponsor" for.
Usually organizations that provide fiscal sponsorship will take about 8% of a grant and use that for administrative costs. So if SPI received $100,000 total in pass thru donations in a year, it would be able to use $8,000 to pay for accounting costs, bank fees, filing fees, whatever. By the way, we are working on a project to create collaborative directories for social change activists on the web. For example we have a directory in a prototype stage at www.agitate.net/wfc, which is a directory of social change listservs. This is a Php/Mysql application that will become open source as soon as a few more features are added. It would have been nice if SPI was able to help us in the first six months of this year when we did not have tax exempt status. Fortunatlely we got our own status in July, but if we had been able to work with SPI earlier we might have received additional grants. -rich
Free projects are not in need of computing resources any more as they were before sourceforge came about. They are, however, still in need of an organization that can handle donations and legal issues if required. This is a hole that SPI is also designed to fill, and I think that it can do this. The public is aware of the internet in general, but work could still be done in developing countries. Try not to think too US specific... for example a program where corporations donate everything from a 386 up to get a tax break and these PCs are installed with Linux to be a cheap mail/web interface and sent to developing countries. SPI can accept these donations since its non-profit.
Organizers' Collaborative PO Box 400897, Cambridge MA 02140 (617) 776-6176 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.organizenow.net
