[Theforum] community vs. corporations (was: funding options)

Marlene Bruce marlene at members.evolt.org
Fri May 24 12:32:34 CDT 2002


>>ideally, yes, affiliate hosting would be much preferred to payment
>>from meo users, but i also think a nominal fee on meo inserts just
>>enough of a barrier to those looking to host just images and other
>>stuff...  even at $3 a month (or whatever), it's a great deal...
>
>Sounds like
>http://freezope2.nipltd.net/acorn/evolt/HonestMoney
>to me.

I agree. Creating a little bit of a barrier will help determine who
really finds having meo useful.

It seems the global picture of sustainable funding comes down to this:

1. We want evolt.org to be non-commercial and not commercially
affiliated, negatively influenced, or biased.
2. We want evolt.org to be by and for the community. IOW, a democracy.

With those in mind, it seems the first place to go for support is the
community, not corporations.

With community rights comes community responsibility. In any
real-world community, part of the responsibility is to support the
community and its services through paying taxes. (Bear with me
here...)

If the community can't support community services on its own, then
corporations are brought in. We can see evidence of this in the US
public schools (which now have corporate sponsors, in-school
advertising and services through vending machines, etc., and
scenarios involving those corporations in school-book problems).
Another example is "public" radio and TV (NPR and PBS) which are now
substantially sustained by corporations, hence the advertising thinly
disguised as sponsor acknowledgements.

Do we want that to happen to evolt.org? Not if we can avoid it.

So barring the appearance of an angel investor/supporter (which was
one of Dan's major contributions), we have to look back to the
community for our support. Which brings us back to the taxes scenario.

Of course we can't ask for taxes, but we can ask for financial
support in other ways. One is to ask people to contribute what they
*can* for meo space. I'm just throwing ideas out here, but perhaps
the thing to do is not to set a gift amount, but to *suggest* a gift
amount (starting at something really low). Perhaps we can require
that people give *something* in order to partake in the meo service,
whatever they can afford according to their economic situation? I
dunno...

I don't currently see any way to keep meo free. I'd like to be wrong,
but it's either get funding from the community or get it from
corporations.

Unless someone knows an angel investor who'd simply be willing to support us?

I'll let you know if I get any other ideas on how to gain community funding...

Marlene



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