Discussion and poll: Donations

[zicada]

Hi everyone

I wanted to start a thread discussing donations. Im interested in what arguments you all might have for or against this. That is to say, monetary donations. Single, or on a monthly basis.

The cold hard truth, is that for NWN2, we are most likely going to have to facilitate and accept donations to a greater extent than we do now with NWN1.

What are the possible issues related to this ?
Do we have a choice ?
What are some good ways to implement ?
What are some bad ways to implement ?


Discuss!

[dergon darkhelm]

Although I would like to slightly rephrase and change


"rely on" to "facilitate and accept anonymous"

[Veilan]

Well, I don't think we should rely on monetary donations - but I'm not opposed to incorporating them into our hosting scheme as we can and have to, as in fact monetary donations, hardware shipped around and pipe time was already used from voluntary donors in ALFA 1.

[KnightLight]

I think that as long as we have the same quality RP we had in ALFA1, we will still have people who are willing to donate hosting. As far as people who are willing but not quite able, then yes, we should have some kind of system for monetary donations.

However, a system of monetary donations DOES bring up the opportunity for accusations of corruption, so we should be careful about how we keep track of donations... we don't want to turn ALFA into a bureaucracy.

I don't really think we should just put all the donations into a big pile... would there be some way that we could post hosting and hardware costs, and subdivide donations to help support each server?

Essentially, ALFA has always relied on the generosity of ALFAns... it's what makes us the communtiy that we are.

[zicada]

Although I would like to slightly rephrase and change


"rely on" to "facilitate and accept anonymous"

Good point. Done

[psycho_leo]

Do we have to rely on donations? Well... of course. We already have members that donate money, either by hosting mods themselves of paying for DS. With that said, hosting costs for NWN2 mods are going to be higher. Some of our currents hosts might not be able to handle the new mods and some might just want to stick with their NWN mods.

If you want to facilitate donations in some way I'd say go for it.
Now if you are talking about charging for membership I'd have to say no. Some of us don't have the cash to spare, but even then are willing to contribute with their time, either by builiding or DMing.

[zicada]

Personally, i'm imagining it something like this:

Run a 3 month donating-drive, and try to afford atleast one real server that will "belong" to ALFA. A real 1U server is much easier than a regular box to place at a serverpark, and if its dualcore and has 5GB ram, it could host 2 large modules flawlessly. With time, we might be able to aquire a second one,- and so on. If "ownership" of these are given to the current admin body at any one time,- controlled by IA's hosting team,- we really solve most hosting problems, including the problem of one person beeing able to take machines "hostage",- while at the same time offering the best possible hosting.

This is really the best possible outcome i can think of personally.

If 200 members are able to donate $30 on average over a 3 month period (eg some donating more, others donating nothing, most donating $5 or $10 etc) this is quite possible to do.

How would this work legally ? We are a registered organization in the US. Not sure what that entails in the US. Is it practical to do this ?

[dergon darkhelm]

*nods* I like the idea of soliciting donations with a few caveats:



We absolutely must not give the impression to the membership, especially newly recruited membership, that donation is somehow expected.

Keep donations anonymous.

Working out the details of a finance committee, bookingkeeping, treasury and all that crap....I officially volunteer someone else to deal with.

[NickD]

There is, of course, the danger that people who donate money to ALFA gain more of a sense of ownership in the project, especially if the donation drive has a physical result, such as a machine. In normal circumstances this wouldn't be a bad thing, in this community, a higher sense of ownership and widely differing views do not mix well.

I expect it may also lead to a higher rate of burn-out from the Administration.

I don't see this as being a problem for small donations with a Paypal link or something, where people are just helping out with liquid payments such as hosting and the like. But when you have 3 month donation drives for machines, things could get a bit unpleasantly political.

Also: From memory, Boom got more or less donated a machine when his blew up, but that was a specific call for a machine, for a specific purpose and was met by a specific group of people who would directly benefit from Boom having this machine. Who would purchase this machine? Who would keep it and why? What if they leave ALFA?

[zicada]

There is, of course, the danger that people who donate money to ALFA gain more of a sense of ownership in the project, especially if the donation drive has a physical result, such as a machine. In normal circumstances this wouldn't be a bad thing, in this community, a higher sense of ownership and widely differing views do not mix well.

I expect it may also lead to a higher rate of burn-out from the Administration.

I don't see this as being a problem for small donations with a Paypal link or something, where people are just helping out with liquid payments such as hosting and the like. But when you have 3 month donation drives for machines, things could get a bit unpleasantly political.

Also: From memory, Boom got more or less donated a machine when his blew up, but that was a specific call for a machine, for a specific purpose and was met by a specific group of people who would directly benefit from Boom having this machine. Who would purchase this machine? Who would keep it and why? What if they leave ALFA?

What I'm proposing is that no single person owns the hardware. ALFA would own it, and whoever is in office as the admin body would control it. Nobody keeps it either, as it would be hosted at a 3rd party professional serverpark. The IA hosting team would maintain and run.

As long as everyone donating agrees to those terms, should we still fear alot of drama ? And if so, would such drama be something we cant deal with, or so much that the we should decide not to go ahead with it at all ?

Is it even possible to disagree with how the hardware is put to use ? If we get 2 servers, we have 4 live nwn2 modules running smoothly for everyone to use.

One issue i can see is having more modules than serverslots to put them on. I imagine an anonymous vote among everyone who donated to pick the modules to host would be the way to solve this.

[zicada]

For the sake of stating the obvious.

A few nwn2 modules are nearing beta stages. The same is true for the core systems.

Since sorting out a donations system, and the guidelines and documentation needed, necessarily takes time, i think we have to decide relatively quickly and get to work.

Should a staff under one single admin position be in charge of bookeeping, or do we create a team with a representative from each admin ? What are the advantages and disadvantages ?

How can we possibly create such a system while keeping the beurocracy and ammount of people involved to a minimum ?
What happens when people in charge of these things leave ? (Documentation, organization)

[zicada]

I've rethaught this some more. There really is no reason for us to have more than 1 server. 1 server is cheaper to host than 2, + the added benefits of localvault.

So, the optimal situation would be something like this:

If we should be able to get the money required for a dual quadcore xeon with 16gb ram, we could have 1 server hosted at a professional serverpark that could host 7 NWN2 modules + the persistancy database.

If we were to somehow make this reality we would solve all the problems i can think of related to hosting, ownership, professionalism, stability and performance.

Each HDM would get their own account, where they could upload their modules and restart their own servers without affecting the other ones.

We would have a local database for persistancy. Since we are using nwnx in NWN2 this is important, and solves alot of issues. It also gives us even more possibilities. Cipher can probably say more about this.

Im imagining a paypal icon on the webpage, and a script that posts the current sum donated, and for example 3 targets we have, with a server able to host 7 modules obviously at the top.

If our members donate a single sum average of $25 each, we can reach the top target.

Ideas/thaughts ?

[Mord]

I'd be more than happy to donate $25 to help make that possible.

[Magonushi]

same.

[ThinkTank]

Anything involving money gets tricky somewhere along the line.

For example, somewhere in my hazy recollections I remeber NWN persistant servers not being allowed to run for a third party community if profitering was involved and the creators/producers/whatever did not sanction such.

While donations to a NWN community might not seem to mean, paying a third party to play NWN online. Legal arguments can arise over much stupider misunderstandings.

I would send uber hardware if I had it going begging certainly, but paypal transfers and so on sound like it could all go horribly wrong somewhere.

I also draw said attention to the following:

ALFA1: "Hay guy I just donated, ho ho so how bout them elves"
ALFA2: "Yeah same here, also lawl elves"
ALFA3: "Psh donations"
ALFA2: "wtf man? you havent?"
ALFA3: "Whuteva, its not like its mandatory"
ALFA1: "So what you dont want good NWN2 servers?"
ALFA3: "Wait, no I didnt say that..."
ALFA2: "Sure, so we pay and you get good servers, that it?"
ALFA3: "What? no wait I.."
ALFA1: "Sure, whatever man, anyway those elves."
ALFA2: "Lawl elves."
ALFA3: " =( "