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

[Paul Wise]

On Mon, 2016-02-29 at 10:20 -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.)

Right now we don't have great ways to do this outside of DebConf AFAIK.
We could adapt the things done for DebConf to this; a thanks on
identi.ca and twitter etc.

> 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".

We recognise financial partners in the partners program, but those are
more like ongoing financial support, like revenue sharing programs.

I don't think we have ever had a public list of donors other than
corporate sponsors as I don't think we had the financial data to
support doing this properly yet?

> 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.)

I'd say remove donors one year after they donated rather than reset
every year. This way each donor gets one year of recognition. People
should have the option to donate anonymously though.

Ongoing donors are recognised in the partners program under financial
partners I would say.

I'd suggest doing a survey of donors/sponsors pages for Linux
distributions and Free Software non-profits (like FSF/SFC) to see what
best practice is and what features we should have. Some links:

https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/
https://www.gnu.org/thankgnus
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors
https://www.gentoo.org/inside-gentoo/sponsors/
https://linuxmint.com/donors.php
https://grml.org/donations/
https://grml.org/sponsors/
http://aptosid.com/index.php?module=Content&func=view&pid=8
https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en

I was thinking of putting hosting sponsors on contributors.d.o but
through discussion with contributors folks we decided that wasn't the
best way to do it as they are more like partners. I wonder about
individuals and companies who donate at certain times though, maybe
that fits better with the model of contributors.d.o.

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise


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