On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 09:57:03PM -0600, Ted Gould wrote:
On Sat, 2012-11-17 at 20:05 +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Note that I don't have much knowledge of Inkscape's financial affairs. I don't know how much money Inkscape needs, and if we actually need the money or not.
In general, I'd describe our finances as "don't have a lot of money, but don't need a lot of money." We don't have anything that way pay regularly, but we do get in money from GSoC and Packt and donations. Generally we've used that kinda ad hoc for things as they've come up.
Yeah, we get just enough income that it keeps us busy managing it, but not enough income to do interesting things with it. I think it amounts to a few thousand a year; I'd guess roughly half is from the GSoC $500/mentor payments, so varies a lot depending on whether mentors contribute or keep that.
So, it's a non-trivial amount, but not really enough to for instance pay for everyone's airfare or pay a developer's salary.
Most of what we'd have as costs otherwise are gotten through free services. We use Launchpad and Sourceforge for a lot of our server costs. The Conservancy donates its services to us. SFLC did the work for the trademark for us. etc. etc.
I think that we should probably come up with some ideas both on the generating and spending side of finances, but we don't have any today. Proposals welcome!
I agree, I'd love to see some proposals for putting some of this money to work. In particular, with what we have right now it'd be nice to see proposals for $1000-2000 increments.
There has been talk about holding fundraisers. If we had a good project proposal that would cost significantly more than what we have in the coffers, we might have good luck making it a public solicitation. People may be more interested in making donations to a specific targeted effort. What we need is a good plan and someone to get it organized and off the ground.
Bryce