(Sorry for the longish subject, I hope I have your attention now.) LinuxTag is over. I had to catch up a lot because I missed 4 days of work and I didn't find the time to blog about it. Nevertheless I want to share what I have learned as the primary event owner. 1. We need credit cards We need credit cards or a reliable way to get money. I know of people who are waiting for money for months and depending on the amount it can be really bad. I paid for nearly all LinuxTag expenses, more than 2500 EUR. In addition to that I booked the hotel for Zoltan in Vienna, another 310 EUR. On the other hand Max prepaid me 1000 EUR. Still this means I had to prepay more than 1800 EUR. Reimbursing people does not work when we are talking about these kind of sums. Purchase orders don't work either, they take way to long and are to unreliable, at least here in Germany. Thus we need credit cards. 2. We need a legal entity But wait, credit cards will not solve our problems either because they don't deal with liability. If I book a hotel, I am liable. We need a legal entity to share the liability and to minimize the risks for the individual contributors. Some things cannot be paid with credit cards, they require a bank account. A bank account again requires a legal entity. And we need the legal entity not only for the expenses but also for earnings. I ordered ambassador's polo shirts for more than 850 EUR. Some of them are already 'sold' to our contributors, but others will be delivered at FUDCon Milan, so it will take a while until I get my money. I doubt that Community Architecture can take over the costs because how would we pay them in return? Even if Comm Arch could receive payments from contributors, could it in another fiscal quarter or even fiscal year? For this very reason we had the NPO: While my money is to work for me and not for Fedora, the funds of the NPO are to enable Fedora contributors to spread Fedora in a way that Comm Arch obviously cannot. 3. The legal entity must have "Fedora" in it's name One of the requirements of the Red Hat Legal dept for continuing the Fedora EMEA NPO was that it must change the name to something without Fedora. But this doesn't work: When we sponsor the drinks in the project area of LinuxTag, we want to make some good PR of it. This means we want the poster to say "These drinks are brought to you by the Fedora Project" instead of "These drinks are brought to you by yet another Linux user group". 4. The NPO must be granted the Fedora trademark Jared, do you remember when we were sitting at Rheinfelden and brainstormed for cool swag like baseball caps, mugs, pins and all that? On the same weekend we also closed down the NPO, but we failed to see the consequences: All the cool swag we have been thinking of will never happen. Without an NPO we have to stick with cheap give-aways like buttons or stickers because it will be hard to find somebody who can pay for the production of expensive things like mugs or baseball caps. That person basically has to sponsor the production because without the NPO we cannot sell something, thus he never gets his money back. And even if we had an NPO to produce and sell stuff, we cannot do Fedora swag because this NPO would not be allowed to use the Fedora logo and trademark. Take a look at other projects, say Debian: They have quite a lot of swag: Shirts, caps, ties, mugs, wine, books, ... Sometimes I wonder if they still do Linux because they hardly have any media, but all this swag helps them to raise money for their project. It's a pity we cannot do the same and it is bad for both the Fedora Project and Red Hat. I am looking forward to your suggestions how we can overcome this problem. Regards, Christoph _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
