[thechat] Thanks!! and...

[David Kaufman]

Hi Erika,

Sorry for my late reply.  My third daughter was born last week!


"Erika" <ekm at seastorm.com> wrote:
> The hosting/cost issue is of interest.  Is this a sleeping giant that we
> don't want to rouse?

Not at all!  Sorry to displace the mystery and international intrigue with 
a bit of rather boring administrivia, but evolt.org is currently an 
unincorporated not-for-profit organization registered in the state of New 
Jersey (um, 5 years and 2 days ago! ...by yours truly).  Becoming an 
official organization turned out to be a relatively simple matter of 
obtaining a IRS tax id number (an EIN) by filing one form.  This one:
http://www.gigawatt.com/dk/evolt/ss4-evolt.pdf

which grants us all of the legal status of a knitting club or little league 
baseball team -- or in other words, allows evolt.org to have a checking 
account in its own name, accept checks made out to evolt and, most 
importantly as it turned out, accept electronic payments from Google :-)

> Or should it be brought forward?

Feel free!  We have no secrets.  I've been performing the duties of 
evolt.org treasurer for about the last four years, and I can assure you 
there is no mysterious behind-the-scenes benefactor, and there is no cabal.

My active involvelment with evolt started in 2003 with setting up the evolt 
gear on Cafepress:
http://lists.evolt.org/pipermail/theforum/Week-of-Mon-20030407/000011.html

and then, because we needed somewhere to put the money or something, I 
worked on setting up the bank account:
http://lists.evolt.org/financearchive/2003-August/000262.html

which I suppose was how I became treasurer after Marlene moved on.  We now 
have a business checking account, a Paypal account, a Google AdSense 
account, and a net worth of about $2200.  Our total hosting costs at 
ThePlanet.com for one dedicated server and 1500 gigabytes of bandwidth are 
$69 per month.  It was $59 a month when we initially rented the server in 
June of 2004, but they raised the rent on us once.

Almost all of our revenue comes from the Google ads you see on BEO:
http://browsers.evolt.org/

although we do also see a steady trickle of PayPal donations, some sales 
commissions from the evolt geat on Cafepress, and the occassional Amazon 
Associates referral fee that helps out as well.

Did you ask for numbers?  Okay but you gotta crunch em:
http://www.gigawatt.com/dk/evolt/traffic-through-2008.csv

> If we are still
> actively soliciting donations, it would be good to have those facts and
> numbers, and/or if it's being happily donated, does the benefactor want
> to be known?

We are certainly *accepting* and very appreciative of donations although 
we're not dependent on donations for our survival, so we haven't had to do 
anything resembling "active solicitation" (i.e. loud begging) beyond the 
simple donations for several years because the google ads cover the 
hosting.  Also donations to evolt.org are not tax-deducatable because we're 
not incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

> I don't know. I'm open to putting it out there, or not,
> depending on what y'all think.

I'd be very pleased if our current organizational and financial story was 
made (more) public, although I'm afraid it's not all that sexy.  If you 
think an anonymous benefactor, or even a cabal, makes for more riveting 
reading, feel free to hint, allude to, and infer some or all of that too. 
Or instead! :-)

> I personally would like to re-energize evolt's content a bit, though.
> Evolt is historically as much a networking/content/community place as a
> web dev help list.

I personally thank you for your enthusiasm.  Those ad impressions are way 
down this year and (speaking as the bean counter) evolt could certainly use 
some re-energizatin'

> I think 10volt is a good time to re-energize.

Me too.

-dave