[Osmf-talk] Anonymous Donations

[Christoph Hormann]

On Friday 04 November 2016, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> The OSMF board has been discussing recently in how far such anonymous
> donations might clash with our commitment to transparency.
>
> We're pretty sure that anonymously taking a donation of £50 or £100
> or even £500 is acceptable. But what if someone wanted to give us,
> say, £50,000 anonymously? Or even more?
>
> Is it ok for us to take anonymous donations of any size? Or should
> there be an upper limit or some other conditions attached to
> donations?
>
> We would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Since as you said this kind of donation is normally already possible 
this for me leads to several considerations regarding acceptability of 
such donations:

1) does it depend on the identity of the donor?
2) does it depend on the motivation of the donor for giving the money?
3) does it depend on the reason why the donor wants it to be 
confidential?
4) does it depend on the sum to be donated?

My answer to these questions would probably be yes/yes/yes/no - although 
for the 'no' regarding the sum i only considered the order of magnitude 
you mentioned, my opinion here would probably change if we are talking 
about much larger amounts of money - like 500k and more, although the 
question of confidentiality would get increasingly academic then.  And 
on the opposite side for small sums considerations 1-3 can also be 
considered insignificant (which is the current situation for small 
donations i suppose).

So the ultimate answer from me would be 'it depends' - and it depends on 
factors that would require knowing the confidential identity of the 
donor and the context of the intention to donate.

Looking at things from another side: the main risk of accepting large 
donations is the possible influence this has on decisions of the OSMF.  
The confidential nature of a donation does not reduce this risk - on 
the contrary, the possibility that such information might leak and 
become publicly known is an additional burden compared to the situation 
where everything is in the open from the beginning.

So without knowing or being able to assess the situation regarding 
questions 1-3 above my advise would be - unless the case is clearly 
innocent, like a private donor who just honestly wants to support the 
project in a large way but wants to protect his/her personal privacy, 
to suggest potential donors, especially corporations/institutions, to 
find different ways to support OSM or to accept their contribution to 
be publicly known.  

There are a lot of ways to support OSM and to be honest - instead of 
just dumping 50k or more on the OSMF it might be more productive to 
split this a bit and distribute the money between various projects 
around OSM many of which could well use financial support.

For context - what has generally in the past been the size distribution 
of donations?  Like how many donations above £500 do you typically 
receive per year?

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/