I wish there were an option for PayPal at the funding page.
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Yeah, that would be quite helpful for a lot of people wishing to donate. I think fundamentally the problem is that the Organisation is still relatively new and a lot of the infrastructure needed is currently missing. We brought up again the discussion in the Monthly call to apply for a NumFOCUS membership, but that would address only 1 of these problems.
That seems like a big cut off the top just to transfer money. What services does NumFOCUS provide to justify that?
Of the top of my head:
- Registration of the legal entity
- Handling of the finances
- Legal services
- Access to GSoC (currently we use LFortran for that)
There is a fair bit more available on their website.
Not quite, organizations can get GSoC projects via NumFOCUS, for Fortran-lang we actually applied as an independent organization and got approved twice now. For LFortran we also get additional GSoC projects via NumFOCUS.
The more important part of being part of some umbrella organization, be it NumFOCUS or BCS, would be having some legal entity as well as support for handling the organizational structure. After all we are mostly volunteers here and already donate our free time. While I personally like to help out with maintaining our infrastructure, making any volunteer in our community responsible for the legal representation or the financial handling seems like too much to ask. Establishing a more formal organizational structure under an umbrella organization would take off some load in this regard.
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Do you mean the overhead that is suggested to the supporter (but can be, if I noticed properly) reduced to 10%, or yet another 15% taken from the beneficiary?
While it is really unsatisfying to see part of a donation go to another organization, this is likely to happen in most available organization models.
If one Fortran-lang member would be responsible to privately receive all donations and redistribute them in the community, they would have to pay taxes on each donation, which is roughly 20% to 25% depending on income and country. Taking this as baseline every service fee below 20% is better.
The alternative is to found our own independent organization and hire somebody to run the administration, however this requires sufficient income from donations to actually fund this position. With few donations the “service fee” might be higher than taxes for an individual. Finding a volunteer for such a job is nothing I want to support.
Eventually, the developer receiving the donations is likely to pay taxes on this income as well, so yes there are multiple deductions from each donation. The only way to reduce the number of deductions from a donation is to directly sponsor a developer.
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