[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Web site updates: Copyright notice and Donation links

[Dan Scott]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 02:32:37PM -0600, Jim Craner wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> First, congratulations to all of you in the community who have been working on the fiscal sponsorship and 
> organizational sustainability issues -- I think that's a huge milestone, so way to go!
> 
> The copyright/intellectual property status of website content is something that the Website Planning Team 
> (http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=webteam) has started discussing recently.  We want to 
> encourage creation and contribution of content from as many community members as possible and 
> encourage distribution and sharing of that content in the most user-friendly manner possible while 
> respecting existing copyright and Creative Commons licensing provisions.  Currently, we've bounced this 
> issue to the greater Communications Committee for further discussion.  If you have any thoughts or 
> questions or would like to get involved, you can check out our Website Planning Team home page linked 
> above or contact me off list.

Great, I think I found the pertinent part of the wiki where the subject
was raising; I'm glad people are thinking about explicit licensing of the
content. Do you have any objections in the mean time to correcting the
current statement on the Web site so that it's 1) not laughably outdated
and 2) reflects that copyright over the content is held by more than GPLS?
 
> The donation button/content/process is great news and it's not something that the Website Team has 
> discussed *at all* yet, but I have some conversation starters that I'd like to share.
> 
> * We don't just want to slap a Donate button up on the site, tell folks *how* to donate, and call it a day.  
> We need to tell folks *why* they should donate, *what* the EG community will do with the donations, and 
> recognize *who* is donating.

Okay. But there are people who have already indicated in this thread
that they would like to donate to the project, presumably because they
trust that the project will do something good with their donations, and
presumably with no strings attached with respect to recognition. In all
honesty, it will probably take quite some time to draft policies around
all of these areas; do you have any objections in the interim to support
opportunistic donations by "slapping up" a donation page (via a link
under "Contribute") with an introductory statement like:

"
Funds donated to the Evergreen project will be directed by the
Evergreen Oversight Board <link to Board description> in accordance with
the goals of the Board, which are to: 

i. promote, support, and advance the development of the Evergreen
software;
ii. support and facilitate the growth of the international community of
Evergreen users; and
iii. foster and protect the Evergreen assets.
"

So, in the interim, it would come down to trusting the Evergreen
Oversight Board to allocate the donations wisely. Which seems reasonable
to me. As you suggest below, there are annual expenses that we have to
cover that until now have been covered by the good graces of various
organizations like GPLS and Equinox - domain name renewals, servers,
etc.

> * With donors comes the need for donor management.  Donor recognition, donor cultivation, etc. are all  
> issues that may not be recognized as important now, but will be in the future, so we should be careful to 
> preserve as much information about our donors and their donations as we can.

Although in the absence of an explicit privacy policy, in the interim we
should perhaps be discarding as much information about our donors and
their donations as we can, no? That said, a number of projects have a
donor page listing donors in descending chronological order, with the
option of being listed anonymously; that seems like enough to me, if we
were to state that as a policy for now. Thoughts?

Large-scale donations may be something different entirely; some projects
recognize platinum / silver / bronze donors via icons & links on the
donation page. In the interim, in the happy event that an individual or
organization wanted to donate some large amount (say, $500 or more) and
get explicit recognition, it would probably make sense to contact the
Evergreen Oversight Board and trust that the right people would be
involved in making a decision and putting a repeatable process in place.

> * A "donate" button gets better results if it's part of a larger call to action.  Maybe it's one part of an overall 
> drive to have "everyone contribute as they can" - whether that's code, money, documentation, testing 
> time, etc.  Maybe it's a drive for a specific fundraising target -- pre-paying for ten years of "evergreen-ils.org" 
> and related domain registrations, or paying the internship salary for a Google Summer of Code intern.  
> Maybe it's just telling the story of an awesome scrappy open source ILS project that is growing rapidly and is 
> seeking funds to build a solid organizational infrastructure to support future growth.  Maybe it's a way folks 
> can get a free T-shirt and a warm fuzzy feeling for a $30 PayPal donation.

Sure, that's part of a much larger conversation that may need to take
place, if we actually identify a need for large-scale fundraising. Some
projects such as the Perl Software Foundation, the Mercurial project,
etc, have raised funds to employ developers full-time for a period of
time; others have raised funds to help bring developers together for
hackfests or offer travel assistance to members from non-profit orgs to
conferences; etc.

In the interim I see nothing wrong with enabling people to contribute if
they feel the urge. In the worst-case scenario, we get tens of thousands
of dollars of opportunistic donations and have to decide what to do
about that. The horror!