[GenABEL-dev] Using advertisements (and other ways) to sponsor GenABEL

[L.C. Karssen]

Dear list,

As you may have noticed over the past year(s) the contributions to the
GenABEL project by Yurii and myself have steadily declined. The main
reason for this is simple: lack of funding. We have started our own
consulting business and although we have tried to include GenABEL into
grant applications wherever we could, we haven't been able to secure any
funds for this.

On the other side of the balance we do have some fixed costs related to
the hosting of the genabel.org website (and some flexible costs related
to its maintenance).

We therefore propose the following:

1) Given that www.genabel.org does receive a reasonable number of
visitors per month we would like to add Google Ads to the pages. This
may not generate a lot of revenue but anything many small bits can help
(see e.g. [1]).
Of course this will lead to a change in layout of the site, but we will
try to make this a minimally disruptive as possible so as not to harm
the user experience.

Of course we understand that this can/should lead to a discussion about
who owns/takes care of the incoming funds. We could set up a foundation
under Dutch law to take care of that. However, that would require around
€3500 per year in accounting/reporting costs, etc. which is much more
than we can invest (and more than we expect to earn from the ads).
Therefore we would like to propose the following: Being the main sponsor
of the Project PolyOmica will manage the funds (any payment will go to
our bank account), and as part of our open policy we will provide a
regular (quarterly? annual?) report to the community of the income
generated and how it was spent (see e.g [2]). Any money that remains
after covering these basic costs can be used to fund further development
of the GenABEL Suite packages (maybe via one of the options listed below).


We also thought of some alternative ways of generating some income:

2) Add a channel on bountysource.com [3]
3) Make the GenABEL Project a Team on Gratipay (formerly GitTip) [1,2,4,5]
4) Join http://flattr.com

Does anyone have experience with any of these micropayment/crowdfunding
providers?


Please let us know what you think of these ideas. We would really love
to make the Project more vibrant and sustainable than it currently is!


Lennart & Yurii.


[1]
http://blogs.perl.org/users/peter_rabbitson/2014/02/i-bought-a-weekly-round-for-my-friends.html
[2] http://inside.gratipay.com/appendices/finances
[3] https://salt.bountysource.com
[4] https://gratipay.com/
[5] https://medium.com/gratipay-blog/gratipay-2-0-2453d3c53077

--
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Lennart C. Karssen
PolyOmica
Groningen
The Netherlands

l.c.karssen at polyomica.com
GPG key ID: 1A15AF2A
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/genabel-devel/attachments/20151014/dffc1d57/attachment.sig>