Re: [gentoo-project] Fundraising for incremental service level

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 7:44 PM Andrey Utkin <andrey_utkin@g.o> wrote:
>
> Just hypothetically, if everybody agrees for it, would this technically work
> for Gentoo Foundation to collect donations for specific purpose? Is there a
> possibility to have "purpose" metadata in donations? I suppose a fallback
> technical option would be to have a separate bank account or something.
>

This is generally legal and nonprofits do this all the time.  However,
there are a lot of things to be considered (offhand):

1.  All the compliance concerns anytime you spend money still apply.
You need to pay reasonable rates, and probably need to be careful
about spending too much on any one person/company.
2.  What happens if you collect a bunch of money and then can't do the
project, or the project fails?  Maybe you get half the money you need
but not enough to finish.  Maybe things just go wrong.
3.  What happens if you collect more than you need?  (Remember the Red
Cross and 9/11 and all the controversy around using earmarked funds
for other projects.)
4.  Is there a risk that money pulls the org in a direction the
community doesn't desire?

Not saying that any of these should be considered show-stoppers.
However, I'd definitely think about how you're going to mitigate all
of them.  They're all likely to come up once you start doing stuff
like this so you'll want to make sure everybody understands the
policies up-front so that hard feelings are minimized.

-- 
Rich