FSFE Finance (was: Usability)

[Georg C. F. Greve]

 || On Tue, 24 Jul 2001 15:38:41 +0200
 || Josef Dalcolmo <dalcolmo at vh-s.de> wrote: 

 jd> But one can pay a "membership" fee for Greenpeace by subscribing
 jd> to their Journal.

Although I feel that calling it "membership" would be too much of an
euphemism, it seems that several people think it would be good to have
sort of a monthly fee for the FSF Europe.

I tend to agree. 


Of course one-time donations are extremely useful, but in order to be
able to calculate budgets, a guaranteed monthly cash infusion would
sometimes be preferrable.

Because of this we have been thinking about the possibility to have
companies donate smaller amounts (in the range of a few hundred Euro)
every month. 

This is normally not a problem for a company. Viewed from the side of
the company, it is an investment, because many of them use Free
Software or even base their whole business model on it. The FSF Europe
pushes Free Software forward and ensures its future in all areas. Also
it provides a competence center that may prove to be very useful to
companies at times.

In Germany, the first companies seem to have understood this and have
signalled interest or even promised regular donations.


But there is no reason why people shouldn't participate in a similar
way on a smaller scale.


As Bernhard pointed out, we are still considering how to set things
up. 

In order to not have a blank page, we have simply taken the
U.S. funding categories and translated them to Euro with a 1:1
ratio. We feel this is suboptimal, especially since we can't really
display the regulary donations.

So the least thing we should probably do is invent a new
donator-category for regular donators. It might make sense to split
this category between companies and people.


Do you have ideas/input on how to call this new category and how to
organize it?

The FSF Europe would like to properly acknowledge everyone who's
helped us on our way. Suggestions on how to do this best are very
welcome.

Regards,
                Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
GNU Business Network                        (http://mailman.gnubiz.org)
Brave GNU World	                           (http://brave-gnu-world.org)
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