Open Source Ecology Forums

canadaduane

Hi, I'm new to the scene and am excited to support your work. Some day, I hope to have my own land and a space to call my own. For now, I am a city dweller making a living and have a little to spare. I was wondering if I can donate $30 to the cause using bitcoin (the new cryptographic electronic currency)?

dorkmo

i've read about bitcoin on here before. not sure what the offiical policy is.

canadaduane

Based on what I've read on the donations page, it seems to be a privately held account (as opposed to, say a non-profit org) at the moment. I assume it would take someone like Marcin to make the call to accept other forms of donations?

dorkmo

thats my understanding, yup

Nikolayhg

Currently no. I am not aware of the project using alternative currencies.

eBell

Hopefully OSE will be getting Non-Profit status soon. Then I and many others will feel better that their donations are going to be used properly. I'm frankly a little concerned with the lack of transparency. For example, there are ~300 true fans now. That's $3000 a month if they are all at the basic level. Where is all this money going?

dorkmo

i've had that same concern. when i went to visit though, i felt better i think. you see all the steel and supplies theyre using, it becomes apparent a lot of money is getting spent on that stuff. and then theres the plot of land its self. i assume marcin bought it? is he plannign on keeping it or is it to become part of a future organization? im not super worried about it as long as the project keeps going, it seems everyone has the best intentions. it would be beneficial though for marcin to spend a week and get a non-profit set up, then i assume its just a marginal amount of regular paperwork to keep up with. i got an accounting degree a few years ago but i havent really been using it, and i dont know much about what paperowrk is involved in setting up stuff like this. :/

ARGHaynes

Setting up a nonprofit is a pretty fun hurdle, I've worked with my share. I think we are in a sort of catch-22. We need more labor time if we are going to establish a nonprofit. More labor time would mean transitioning one of us from volunteer to employee (or finding someone rich who could volunteer a 12-hour day). Yet, to afford the transition, we would need the financial resources to do it. The financial resources are probably depending on two things, the first is documentation of results, which requires time, as well as results, which requires more volunteers doing work and people leaving Marcin the time to work. The second, is nonprofit status so that people feel more conformable making donations. The circle of life, no?

capiscuas

I was curious and I checked today and the donation page at OSE accepts Bitcoin donations...
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Donate

although the bitcoin donation server seems offline or broken though.
I believe BTC is a quite good option for OSE to avoid transaction fees from donoros and also since the number of product sellers that are accepting bitcoins as a valid payment is increasing exponentially, most of this sellers being IT or tech based... which is what OSE need the most these days... (Servers, Arduinos, RaspberryPi, components, etc...)

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