[okfn-coord] Setting up a 2 funds (for F/OSS and Open Knowledge)

[Saul Albert]

On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 03:22:27PM +0100, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> I'm just floating this idea here on coord first before posting it to
> discuss. Please let me know what you think even if it just a +1 on me 
> sending it to discuss.

Hi Rufus,

I'll comment in more length on discuss... 

I support the idea. I have a few projects I would like to support.. and
some I have small budgets left over for some software project that I
don't want to hold.. it would be good to be able to release those funds
to an organisation such as this.

> Motivation: Here at the OKF we use lots of F/OSS for the work we do (I

Also, Mikey and I find ourselves developing quite a lot of software for
the work we do with The People Speak, and what would be *really* useful
for us is to be able to generalise the use value of those projects by
putting the money we allocate to sofwtare dev into a fund that 'deals
with' the frameworks necessary:

- development framework (okf already does this with kforge)
- legal framework (keeping current with lisencing issues and protecting
  labour accordingly)
- political framework - underpinning the tiny, functional increments of
  sw development with an overall picture that becomes political.

So, I think there's a lot of more functional / economic activities that
could be fleshed out by such a fund, but I'll spend the time on
commenting to a wider discussion on the discuss list..

> == Fund 1: Generic F/OSS Fund ==
> 
> Summary: Donates money to F/OSS projects that produce software we use.
> 
> Amount: 500 EUR / year

I also think starting small is good, but we could make it scalable... 500
EUR is nice, 50,000 is better :)

All the best,

Saul.