[steering] DRAFT - Call for vote

[John Handelaar]

On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 19:27, Martin Burns wrote:

Oh, come on.  We both know each other well enough to
realise this doesn't contain any answers to the
questions asked.  I'm figuring you have them.

> I'm not talking about 'membership to view the site'. I'm talking about
> effectively paying for hosting of some specific community tools.

Unanswered Q1:  What are they?

> So why have meo members felt a need to use meo as a production hosting
> of photo albums & blogs?

Blogs and photo albums don't really qualify as 'production'
to me, as a general rule, but I know what you're getting at
(we had the whole MEO conversation in that pub before it
came up here, after all).

> I don't know what the financials are for f2o,
> but I imagine that the front page price of $7 a month and up is not
> there for show.

Yeah, but they're actually providing hosting, not a corner
of a plone site over which members would have little or no
design control.  Which I think is a great community source
but not a paying product.  *At the moment.*  No info yet.

Ergo, locking it down to paid-for in the decision process
now is I think premature.  I'll accept 'might need to be',
obviously.  Just not, at the moment, 'will'.

> > eouk is paid for by (iirc) 4 people.  Are there really not 8 people out
> > of our thousands who would do the same?
>
> OK, you come up with the donations, guaranteed for a year, and we can
> look at making it free to members.

Unanswered Q2 (ignored for some reason):  Why aren't we
actually trying to get donations?  You know better than
anyone the difference between putting a sticker on a
lamppost, and actually approaching people to ask for
donations.

And - it's not *me* that's proposing the new site anyway.

To sell a service (more on that in a moment, btw [1] )
you need

a) Something which people want to buy
b) which isn't done better or cheaper elsewhere

In the absence of revenue, and assuming (quite a big
assumption, this) that there actually *is* a marginal
cost in the service's provision, raising donations is
not the way to plug the gap.  *Not doing it* is.

You and I can be (are, most always) far more productive
than this last post suggests.  Let's actually hammer it
out...

jh

[1] Secondary point: Don't you also need to be incorporated,
    and not in the nonprofit sense, to sell things and
    collect sales tax on them?

--
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John Handelaar

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