[openspending-dev] Independently keeping the lights on: Ideas?

Wed Sep 24 10:15:20 UTC 2014

Hi again,

As I mentioned in my previous email OpenSpending does not have a revenue 
source to pay for the hosting costs (and Open Knowledge has been very 
kind to help us out on that front).

We have been looking into getting sponsored hosting for OpenSpending 
because the server cost is the biggest cost of the project. Irrespective 
of sponsored hosting or not, I think OpenSpending could benefit from not 
being "broke" so I wanted to start a discussion with you (the community) 
to see if you have any ideas for how we can get some sort of money into 
the project.

The last thing I would want to do is charge users for hosting data on 
OpenSpending. I just think it feels weird to charge people who want to 
help increase government transparency. Another thing I'd like to avoid 
is removing functionality of the OpenSpending platform just because they 
can be expensive to do.

But we do need to somehow connect money coming in with money going out 
(as more datasets are created the costs of storing/processing them goes 
up) so ideas where increasing costs are covered by some sort of 
increasing revenue are preferable but at this moment, anything is better 
than nothing, so all ideas are welcomed :-)

I'm just thinking about brainstorming now. We can look into how viable 
the ideas are later.

Do you have any ideas?

/Tryggvi