[IAEP] [SLOBS] [Sur] "New Co" / Nueva Empresa

[Aleksey Lim]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:54:34AM -0700, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
> 
> Hi...
>
> At the olpcSF meeting last October some of us met informally and discussed
> the need for exactly what you are suggesting: an organization that would
> act as an "umbrella" for groups that wanted to fund small deployments and
> make other contributions to the OLPC, Sugar, and open source software in
> education (OSSIE).
>
> As far as I know, nothing has been done to implement this idea yet. Some
> of the suggestions we had were:
>
> * It should be a completely separate entity from OLPC and Sugar Labs to
>   insure independence.

In fact, Sugar Labs was for me exactly such "umbrella" (pure community
based organization to coordinate not only Sugar development but also any
Sugar learning platform related work "in the field") from the beginning.
So, being independent from Sugar Labs sounds for me like being
independent from the community :).

Anyway, if I got Bradley Kuhn right, right now, it is rather impossible
to proceed operations like funding local mini/micro deployments from
Sugar Labs level. So, it should be new organization in any case.

> * It should file as a registered 501c3 NGO that could
>   act as an umbrella organization for the local groups that are meeting and
>   raising funds for their deployments and other OLPC/Sugar Related activities.
>   In addition to the NGO status, they could carry liability insurance so local
>   groups under the "umbrella" would be able to qualify for free meeting space
>   as a non-profit.

I'm not confident in such cases, but will it be possible to operate on
behalf of 501c3 NGO out of USA? Actually, the one of purposes to raise
this question in SLOBs was the fact that a group of people (including
me) is trying to process exactly such mini/micro (at least from the beginning)
deployment in Peru.

> * The name that we used for the group was "Bumblebees." One reason for choosing
>   that was it in no way indicates relation to OLPC or Sugar Labs.
>
> We didn't keep a list of who was there, but I do remember SJ, Craig Perue,
> and I think Mark Battley being there. They can probably fill you in with other info.  
> It would be really helpful to local groups if this could happen.  For olpc-SoCal,
> here in Southern California, it would allow us and other groups like ours to get
> free meeting space (insurance and NGO status required), to hold events like a
> Scratch Day and similar, and to raise funds for small deployments.
>
> Caryl

Did you consider joining existing crowdfunding efforts (I assume there
should be kickstarter like sites that are related to edu) instead of
creating new GNO? If it is not trivial to handle donations worldwide, it
might be useful to reuse already done work.

In any case, I personally really like idea of crowdfunding site (reuse
existing one or creating new one). The process seems to be very
community driven when there is no need in organization that handles
everything, just an organization that process technical work and
declares basic rules, the rest is community driven and self organized.
For example, anyone can create new project and ask for funding.

-- 
Aleksey