[Owncloud] Flattr for the release?

[Frank Karlitschek]

Hi Michael,

in general it´s a good idea to collect donations of course. But this has some important implications.

- We need an organization who is the owner of this flattr account. It´s now a good idea that this account is owned by me, you or any other individual
- We need a democratic elected organization who decided how this money is spent.
- We need a shared bank account to hold this money. 
- We need a non profit status of this organization so that we don´t have to pay taxes.
- A person to handle the money transfers, book keeping, tax declaration and more.
- A several other requirements.

It´s very important to me do this in the right way (TM) because this has a lot of potential to create significant harm inside our community like for example tax implications for individuals, legal implications for some of us, mistrust inside the community about the spending of the money and a lot more

ownCloud doesn´t have this kind of organization to handle this donations in the right way at the moment. But this is not a problem because we are part of KDE and KDE has the KDE e.V. which is created exactly for that reason.

So what we should do here is to motivate our users to donate to KDE e.V. (perhaps with a flattr button or something else) and than we can expect from the KDE e.V. to support our developer meetings and other expenses we have.


Cheers
Frank




On 08.10.2011, at 01:14, Michael Grosser wrote:

> Hey,
> 
> I'm Michael Grosser.
> Just to give you a hint who I am:
> I'm the guy providing http://demo.owncloud.org.
> 
> For the upcoming release I wanted to suggest to implement flattr.com buttons.
> 
> If you don't know what flattr is about:
> Flattr is a microdonation system that launched in March 2010 on an invite-only basis[1] and then opened to the public on 12 August of the same year.[2][3]
> 
> Flattr is a project started by Peter Sunde and Linus Olsson. Users are able to pay a small amount every month (minimum 2 euros) and then click Flattr buttons on sites to share the money they paid among those sites, comparable to an Internet tip jar. (The word "flattr" is used as a verb, to indicate payments through the Flattr system-so when a user clicks a Flattr button and they are logged in to the Flattr site, they are said to be "flattring" the page they are on.) Sunde said, "We want to encourage people to share money as well as content."
> extracted from wikipedia.org 
> 
> The owncloud account is already set up and the code, is sort of in the start position. It is ready and could be made public in under 5 min.
> 
> My idea is to have the flattr buttons ready for the release and think about what to do with the money later.
> The money should be held in the flattr account till we know what to do with it. The payout would be the date important for anything legal anyway.
> 
> My suggestion would be following buttons:
> 
> one in the demo.owncloud.org header
> one in the header of owncloud.org
> and one for each specific page
> and later perhaps one in the owncloud installation code (under a contribute tab under settings or so)
> 
> The reason for so many buttons is in my opinion feedback. Users can appriciate the ownCloud project with the main button in the header, and could appreciate the demo with the button from the demo. 
> 
> As Jacob wrote in irc:
> It's not about having the money from the docs go elsewhere. It is about giving the user the ability to be able to show a "directed" appreciation, e.g. "I really like that you have a demo server. keep it up!" or "That documentation really helped. Thanks!"
> there's one button for the show itself, but another one for each episode to let the user be able to show "yes, _this_ was a great episode, thanks!"
> 
> What is your opinion?
> No buttons at all? Just one button? Any suggestions?
> 
> Cheers Michael
> 
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Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org