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

Wed Sep 24 11:31:32 UTC 2014

Hi All (again),

I also meant to give some more context here and highlight our earlier 
discussions here. Specifically, we started a thread on this back in 
June, see 
https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/openspending/2014-June/002243.html

 From that email:
> OpenSpending has seen significant growth since its formal launch in 2011.
> In the last year alone the amount of data in OpenSpending has doubled (from
> 12m to 25m records today) and we anticipate this growth continuing.
>
> This is a cause for celebration but is also putting significant strain on
> the infrastructure. The OpenSpending Steering group
> <http://community.openspending.org/about/governance/members-of-the-steering-group/>
> therefore set out on its last call
> <https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1jCB-RquGYeW9mm466ViucMRjggbCxa0pGZDH5JThcRc/edit#>
> to discuss these challenges in greater detail in this document
> <https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1r3KHUiQ4g4av_E22wIZLEvG_m9OtbKn13o98bv70nnY/edit#heading=h.w9mt2xsythb3>
> - see also below.
>
> For the last several years, Open Knowledge has been able to sponsor the
> entirety of the core infrastructure (servers, sysadmin, essential bugfixes)
> thanks both to the limited size of the project and the great support of the
> Knight Foundation for the SpendingStories project from 2011-2013.
>
> With the increasing technical demands and the ending of that support we need
> to secure additional resources (whether financial or in-kind) to support
> OpenSpending Project and its infrastructure going forward.

Mark Brough has already shared some great thoughts here and would love 
to hear from others - both in terms of ideas and any thoughts on getting 
in-kind or financial support for hosting specifically.

On mið 24.sep 2014 10:16, Tryggvi Björgvinsson wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> (Sorry for cross-posting)
>
> 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
>