[dpl-helpers] [Debian-sponsors-discuss] How to recognize larger non-earmarked financial contributions to Debian?

[Brian Gupta]

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Luca Filipozzi <lfilipoz at debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:19:07AM -0500, Brian Gupta wrote:
>> donations at debian.org (auditors) has been having a back and forth with
>> a company, that now wants to contribute $5k to Debian's General Fund.
>> (We gave them the choice to donate to DebConf, but they chose general
>> fund). I know the logistics of handling the incoming funds, but I'm
>> not sure how to get them the proper recognition, as we don't have a
>> standard way to recognize financial donations to our general fund.
>> (This company also contributes services to Debian.)
>>
>> I thought maybe the partners page, but the Partners Program info page
>> states "Donations will be recognized separately". Under donations,
>> there doesn't seem to be a list of financial donors, only "equipment
>> and service", "hosting and hardware sponsors" and "official mirror
>> sponsors".
>>
>> Perhaps we can do something like WIkipedia benefactors page [1], which
>> is reset and archived each year.  (I am pretty sure we need something
>> that is reset annually, and in general should have some policy to
>> prioritize recognition of more recent and ongoing donors.)
>>
>> [1] - https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors
>
> I'm of the opinion that Donation and Partner recognition be merged.

Thank you for your input. This might be a desirable goal, but I must
admit I am currently on the fence. (I can probably be convinced either
way.)

My top concern In that this would be a huge amount of work to
coordinate this, and in the area of fundraising and such, we have a
shortage of trusted folks to do work. (I barely have any Debian time,
and I know other members of the auditor team don't have much more free
time).

I'd say this, if someone volunteered to do the work of tracking down
all these in-kind donations, prior to a merge, I'd be willing to
reconsider.

As a practical matter, it's probably a prerequisite to do all the
"equivalent valuations" prior to merging the two types of donations.
Once that is done it's a much more realistic option.

For now I'm going to assume that we need to keep a list of financial
donors, that is separate from the in-kind donors. If someone want to
put in-kind values on the

> Partners can be asked to provide an estimate of their annualized non-labour
> in-kind contribution, reflective of their own local economy.
>
> In other words, Bytemark can provide an estimate of their contribution to
> Debian (power, cooling, transit - but not labour) for hosting our equipment.
> Similarly, rcode0 for the DNS service that they provide.  Similarly, Fastly for
> the CDN service that they provide.  Similarly, LeaseWeb for the 'lease' of
> physical servers & storage that they provide.  Similarly, HP and Bytemark those
> years that they donate hardware to us.
>
> Allow Partners that otherwise have very low costs since internally subsidized
> (computer science departments within universities benefiting from
> university-covered transit costs, for example) to provide an extimate that is
> 'commercial-equivalent' by comparing to hosting in a data centre in their
> locale.
>
> Translate all the contribution estimates into a common currency (USD, say,
> since SPI; use rates from same calendar day) only so that the different
> contributions can be ranked along side with cash donations.

This all makes sense, if there is a will to merge the two. (It's a lot of work.)

> Band the contributions into bronze, silver, gold, platinum, whatever.
>
> Display for a year, archive and reset.

Some additional challenges I see with doing this for non financial
contributions.

1) What about the fact that the DSA have a multi-year refresh cycle,
and might get some big servers donated in the year they do their
hardware refreshed, but only gets drives and support in follow on
years? Do we recgnize the servers financial value in the year they
were donated, or spread it out over the useful life? (I think the
answer will probably be ask the donor, if they want the donation
recognized as a series of smaller donations over the lifecycle of the
hardware, or do they want it recognized all in one go.) Actually it
will largely be up to whoever wants to do this work.

> Some contributions might appear inconsequential, in this ranking scheme: this
> $5k donation might seem small when compared to what Bytemark provides.
>
> The reason that I'm excluding labour is because many of us have some portion of
> our work time allocated (sometimes tacitly) to working with/for Debian and I
> view this as 'normal' whereas I view cash / in-kind contributions as
> 'extraordinary'.

Strongly agree that we can't readily count labor in this.

> Having an annualized process for assessing / acknowleding contributions allows
> us to begin thinking about doing 'foundation'-like things: a fund-raising goal,
> a thermometer showing % goal met, etc.

I'm onboard with this, if someone can lead. I just don't have the
bandwidth. My ability is to slowly move things forward. My focus is
still on "making it easier to donated to debian." In this area we now
accept USD via paypal, but I would like to give our donors more
choices in both currency and payment processor.

> Thanks for re-igniting this conversation, Brian.  It's long overdue.
>
> --
> Luca Filipozzi
> http://www.crowdrise.com/SupportDebian