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

[Luca Filipozzi]

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.

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.

Band the contributions into bronze, silver, gold, platinum, whatever.

Display for a year, archive and reset.

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'.

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.

Thanks for re-igniting this conversation, Brian.  It's long overdue.


-- 
Luca Filipozzi
http://www.crowdrise.com/SupportDebian