Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

Hi.

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:19:37AM -0700, Jim Nelson wrote:
> Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) 
> would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances?  (Or 
> do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this 
> goal?)
Reducing costs; although I think it is quite obvious that you cannot spend money 
that you don't receive.
I see potential in various areas, such as our Friends of GNOME 
programme, the travel budget, or the people we pay for GNOME related work.
Right now, we ship donors' gifts from the US.  That's probably not the most 
economical option, esp. when sending things to our European donors.
We could scale down travel support or have a policy that covers, say, up to 80% 
by default.
Also, while we need committed people to do work for us, I'm not entirely
convinced that we need to pay a salary.  We could try to get committed community
members to take over responsibility before thinking of hiring someone to do it
for us.  I don't think we can scale down much further now, though ;-)

As for sources of income, I think we need to make it attractive for people
to give (personal) donations first, before thinking of scaling up or expanding 
in other areas.  That includes being able to receive money via something 
not Paypal or reaching out to our donors and tell them what we've done with the 
money they gave us.

Cheers,
  Tobi