Re: Donations to SPI vs associated projects

It seems both the secretary and chairman hold this view, so who am I
to disagree.

Still, I do have a question and a comment:

I assume this opinion takes into account the plans to hire outside
help for accounting etc work?

If the SPI is sitting on an unnecessarily large pile of cash, a simple
way to get it spent would be to distribute it out to projects (as
suggested by the text shown to donors) is simply to divide the in the
same ratio as how much earmarked donations each project has received
in the previous fiscal year. (E.g. Debian and Postgres would get the
most, etc...) The rationale for this suggestion is that this roughly
correlates with the size and activity of each project, and assuming
that projects spend all of their income, also correlates with their
expenses.

My suggestion can of course be combined with an application based
method of distribution too. That would create a priority order for
spending the funds:
- cover SPI needs first
- distribute money for special project needs based on applications
- share the rest to all, weighted by each projects earmark.

(For disclosure, I'm still the liaison for drizzle, and I don't think
we received any donations in the year just completed, so would not
benefit from the proposed scheme.)

henrik

On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 4:45 AM, Martin Michlmayr <tbm(at)cyrius(dot)com> wrote:
> The SPI donations page at http://spi-inc.org/donations/ currently
> says:
>
>> These donations can be made to SPI directly, or they can be marked
>> for use by a particular member project. It is preferred that the
>> donations be made to SPI, as they can then be used wherever the need
>> is greatest. Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular
>> project will be distributed to the projects that are currently
>> affiliated with SPI as needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.
>
> I'm not speaking for the board now, but personally I disagree with
> this policy. I think we should encourage donors to specify which
> projects they want to support. They are of course welcome to donate
> to SPI to support overall operations, but the preference should be to
> support our associated projects. They know best how to spend their
> money and donors know best which projects they want to support.
>
> Maybe such a policy made sense when SPI had no reserves, but SPI is
> sitting on a healthy cash reserve these days. Also, I'm not aware of
> SPI distributing cash to projects, at least not recently. (SPI
> supported Conservancy's non-profit accounting project, but that's not
> even an SPI member project.)
>
> What do other people think?
>
> --
> Martin Michlmayr
> http://www.cyrius.com/
> _______________________________________________
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> Spi-general(at)lists(dot)spi-inc(dot)org
> http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general

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