Re: help us design nonprofit org funding mechanisms

[glen e. p. ropella]

Kevin Crowston writes:
 > Another possible source for general funding is to charge a "tax" on the
 > project-specific income.  In some ways, this is a variant of your option 4,
 > except that it would be explicitly recognized that part of the funds for
 > projects would pay for general upkeep, rather than relying on
 > "understanding and generous developers" (still important!) to "do a little
 > extra work in their spare time".  This might not be a hard sell, if
 > project-funders realize that their projects will be *more* expensive in the
 > long run without the shared general work.

Doug Orr also mentioned this.  And I had originally thought this
would be the best way to go.  The only problem is that these types
of tasks (what I call level of effort LOE tasks) will be oscillatory
in nature.  They'll come in and start a transient that will die 
down as the money is spent and the task worked on.  There's not
really a problem with that *if* we can gather enough of them to 
keep the money steady.  However, if you gather a bunch of them to
keep money steady, you risk not making progress on any *one* of 
them.  Plus, how does one mesh little LOEs with large LOEs?

Say, for example, we have two LOEs that supply initial funding
for the .org: the || version and the port to NT.  The port to 
NT might take a month where the || might take a year.  Given
one or two people to work on these two projects, do you then 
assume that both dive into the NT port for 1/2 a month and put
off the || version until they're finished?  And if you do that,
do you take the money for the || version at the same time you
take the money for the NT port?  If so, then you're sitting 
on (or worst case...spending) the || LOE sponsor's money for 2 weeks 
before you ever start any work on it.

And that's assuming that all will go well.

I'm not trying to say that the "tax" method won't work.  I assume
that if all this is explained up front and the LOE sponsors still
pay the money, then everything is just fine.  And I think it's 
workable.  But, there are a few complexifications [grin] there
to think about.

And if we do go that way, I'd like the users to have voiced whether
they think these complexities are OK.

glen