[Debconf-team] matching fund ideas
Hi,
After some discussions, I will propose various things we discussed,
some of which are mostly agreed. Each higher number builds on the
lower, so it becomes a matter of how far to go.
1) Accept donations in any currency, but matching is only done in
USD-equivalents($100/$5000 total), which is taken at the end (or
whatever it is transferred). Any exchange rate risk is the donor's,
not the matching sponsor's. (1) is a null-op unless anything below is
approved.
... should be relatively uncontroversial.
1.5) Fees should be stated along with payment methods. Optionally,
fees can be either matched or not. Even publishing fees will
naturally encourage people to use the most efficient method they can.
2) Any method can be used to donate, as long as it can automatically
added to the tally, *and* someone does the work of making it automatic
(but see (3) to relax this requirement)). Since this seems harder to
do for non-paypal things, it's up to someone to write this glue. If
donations are in a different currency, a daily rate can be used for
the automatic tally, which means currency fluctuations might make
total amount go down (but again, donor beware).
Personally I don't expect it to be worth adding a lot of other
methods, but if one of us wants to make another method work, we should
by all means allow them!
3) Accept donations by any methods, even those which can't be
automatically tallied and added to the website. This means we might
"overshoot" on the amount donated. This is a "donor beware" situation
again, as long as they know that sending money to a bank account we
might not find for weeks means it might not be matched. As a
psychological trick, we can say "Donations to paypal/methods which are
automatically tallied will be matched first" on the website.
With option 3, it won't take work to set up other payment methods, but
since there is a risk of overshooting the amount fundraised (not a
problem for us, but it might be for some of the donors), you lose some
of the physiological benefit of the "matching fund".
~~~~~
My personal opinion is to agree to (1), (1.5) and (2). I would agree
to (3) if someone said it wouldn't have effect on the "matching fund"
psychology.
Of course it is up to the sponsor more than us. Our sponsorship team
is contacting them for advice.
~~~~~
I think we should not discuss this from the "anti-paypal moral
standpoint" much (strictly speaking, our time spent on this is
probably worth much more than any fees lost, and possibly even what
else gained from having other methods). My hope is to eliminate the
philosophical debate, and instead leave it up to individuals to decide
what is worth implementing by agreeing on outcomes, not procedures.
And hopefully put this behind us, even if more methods aren't
accepted.
- Richard
--
| Richard Darst - http://rkd.zgib.net/ - pgp 0xBD356740
| "Ye shall know the truth and -- the truth shall make you free"
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