Re: [Fsfe-uk] UKFSN makes a profit

[Marc Eberhard]

Dear Jason,

congratulations for breaking even with UKFSN!

On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 09:35:45PM +0100, Jason Clifford wrote:
> Assuming that September is another good month for UKFSN (ie, income 
> exceeds expenses) UKFSN will reach it's first anniversary in the black and 
> I'll be writing a cheque for AFFS. I'd like to present the cheque at the 
> Linux Expo if anyone from the committee is willing to be a pr tart and 
> accept ;)

The university term restarts in October, which means, I won't be able to
make it to the Expo in London, but I'm pretty sure Alex or someone else will
at least pop around to officially collect the money. :-) But we'll hopefully
get enough people to run a stand there all the time anyway. I strongly
suspect Alex will be our hero again and make all others feel even more
guilty for not being able to attend!

This good news obviously raises another very interesting question, we have
completely ignored so far... what are we going to do with the money? I
think, it's the right time now to start this discussion to give everyone
time to think about it and to collect ideas.

I can see at least two possible options:

- We could choose a project in need and invest directly into resources for
  this project (be it hardware or programming time). This way we could make
  a direct impact on increasing the amount of free software available. It
  could be handled in a kind of application / grant approach. Any project
  could apply for money and we would have to set up some board to decide
  about the priority / amount for each individual project.

- Or we collect the money and reward a few projects once a year with a
  prize. That would of course be done in a way, that it provides both
  PR for us, the project and UKFSN. Again some board would be needed to
  select the projects and some rules would be needed for suggesting a
  project for an award.

There are surely other possibilities, I forgot. OK, enough brainstorming
from my side for now to get the discussion started...

Thanks,
Marc
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