Volunteers wanted

Discuss the LLORG's and HTLAL forum's past and its future here.
Bluepaint
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Volunteers wanted

Postby Bluepaint » Mon Aug 24, 2015 2:37 pm

Hey. So we need volunteers and some lovely people have offered various kinds of help but we could always do with more! In order to make maximum use of volunteers' skills it'll be easier if there is one point of contact for now. If you want to volunteer or if you have already volunteered whether through me or another mod please PM rdearman.

Examples of volunteering:
    technical support,
    improving and updating the forum,
    writing articles for the forum, lang profiles etc,
    advice on creating trusts and not for profits,
    advice on fundraising.

This all sounds rather grand but we're exploring options for now and want to get as much information as possible. One of our main concerns is making sure that the community isn't reliant on only one or two people, no more single points of failure!

If there is any other kind of help you think you can offer please let me know :)

EDIT: Please PM rdearman not Rhian. Mostly interested in content for the main site, so guest blog posts, static content, etc.
Last edited by rdearman on Wed Dec 02, 2015 6:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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emk
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Re: Volunteers wanted

Postby emk » Mon Aug 24, 2015 3:02 pm

Rhian wrote:If you want to volunteer or if you have already volunteered whether through me or another mod please PM me.

Note that if you don't volunteer here, we might still try to lure you in anyway. Several years ago, I didn't run away fast enough. :lol:

But it will really help to have a list, and if you know about bookkeeping or anything else that might be useful in a non-profit, please do feel welcome to get in touch with Rhian. We're definitely hoping to make a community effort of this.
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Michel1020
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Re: Volunteers wanted

Postby Michel1020 » Tue Aug 25, 2015 10:17 am

Rhian wrote:
Examples of volunteering:
    technical support,
    improving and updating the forum,
    writing articles for the forum, lang profiles etc,
    advice on creating trusts and not for profits,
    advice on fundraising.



What do you mean creating "trusts" ?
Is it trust like in I trust you will answer or
a trust like the British Petroleum - the Goldman Sachs - the Mitsubishi or any other name ?
In case you are targeting the second kind - this is not a good time for an IPO.

Do you mean a third kind that I don't know about - never heard of not for profit trust.

My first advice about fundraising is to know how much do we need ?

A Gandi .org domain name is 16,80 euros for a year and ours is running up to may 2016. 17,35 euros for the next year - plus 7,20 euros if the person who pays the next year is not the one who paid before (as far as I understand).

I am not sure if we are hosted by Gandi too and in any case don't know what hosting plan we are in ? Gandi hosting costs between 2 and 16 euros a month.

I don't think we need more than the cheap plan - forum is text only that leads to less trafic and low needs - when we have videos - sounds or pictures we can host them for free on third parties like youtube.

So with Gandi our costs go from less than 50 euros a year up to a little more than 200 euros a year.

Do we need a domain name in the first place ? It is possible to have a free subdomain - like how-to-learn-any-language.ourhost.org. The disadvantage is to be less visible in the web search engines like google and to look less serious business in the view of the many idiots of our world - but since we run as a not for profit, who cares ?

To be less reliant on one or two people we need to share administrative access with more than one or two trusted people - back-up should be kept on the computers of more than one or two people. I have no idea about the size of the htlal.com full backup file.

If we need to pay something we need a payment system where more than one person can pay. Bitcoin for example - I am not an expert in bitcoin but I think if you have a bitcoin address (meaning account number) and its password you can pay from it.
There are other payment systems where you need an email adress and a password.
We could share an email account for that purpose.

That was my free 2 cents - for now.
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emk
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Re: Volunteers wanted

Postby emk » Tue Aug 25, 2015 11:22 am

Michel1020 wrote:Do you mean a third kind that I don't know about - never heard of not for profit trust.

There are definitely non-profit entities called "trusts" in other languages countries. Nobody wishes to set up a predatory international monopoly. :-)

Michel1020 wrote:My first advice about fundraising is to know how much do we need ?

Running off low-end shared hosting is dirt cheap, but it means more database errors and other performance problems. We could continue doing that if the community doesn't mind those problems. If we want those problems to go away, then we probably need a better server. We don't know how big a server would be required to have consistently reliable performance and good backups, but typical costs run from US$50 to $150/month, depending on site traffic and load. We'd try the low-end values first, obviously.

Unless the community tells us otherwise, our goal is not to find the cheapest budget web hosting available. If nothing else, the really low-end hosting plans make it far more difficult to upload changes to the forum software, and they mean more outages and downtime. Or—as with the current plan—the site becomes unreliable every time another site using the same database server undergoes a "distributed denial of service" attack and rdearman needs to bug his hosting company. The money we'd save on hosting would be lost in aggravation, downtime and extra volunteer time.
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Re: Volunteers wanted

Postby e.z.b. » Tue Aug 25, 2015 2:10 pm

As far as fundraising goes, what about using gofundme or a similar crowdsourcing site to get some initial funds in the bank? I know I'd be happy to contribute my 2c (so to speak), and a bunch of small donations can add up fast. It wouldn't be a longterm solution since it's a one-off sort of thing, but it might be a place to start.
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Re: Volunteers wanted

Postby tomgosse » Tue Aug 25, 2015 2:11 pm

One possibility for raising money is to use a site such as http://www.gofundme.com. They do take a percentage of the money raised.
Other information on them here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoFundMe
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Re: Volunteers wanted

Postby emk » Tue Aug 25, 2015 2:34 pm

e.z.b. wrote:As far as fundraising goes, what about using gofundme or a similar crowdsourcing site to get some initial funds in the bank?

Folks around here have asked for two different things:

  1. Some sort of non-profit organization to manage the site.
  2. Some way to contribute to running the site.
And both of these are wonderful ideas! Unfortunately, while either of (1) or (2) would individually easy to do on its own, one of our non-profit advisers says that doing (1) and (2) at the same would require getting some professional advice to make sure we don't break any laws. We've got a checklist and we're working on different possibilities. We'll let you know once we do. :-)
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Re: Volunteers wanted

Postby redtomcat » Tue Aug 25, 2015 4:51 pm

I've PM'd already!

One of the really hairy problems is generating funds! You won't believe how hairy until you try to do it!
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Re: Volunteers wanted

Postby Michel1020 » Tue Aug 25, 2015 6:06 pm

More expensive hosting services don't necessary mean better service and no trouble. Very recently Google itself lost a small part of its servers in Belgium because of lightnings.

For raising fund you could start asking members who want to pay - how much - how often and by what payment method ?
A very first step should be to demonstrate the funds will not be reliant on only one person.

You have to ask if people recommending payable third parties have an interest in these sites.
The same with the people purchasing a new domain name when we have one good for the next 9 months - do they run the domain name merchant ?

I am seriously wondering - do American childrens need a laws adviser and a diplomatic team before they go playing in their neighbour garden with their next door friends - (in case both the garden and their friends belong to the same neighbour) ?

I also question the need for privacy for volunteering - why don't make most of the work publicly - no PM - it is a legal requirement in Belgium to advertise the management and the books and so on as soon as you ask for money from third parties.
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Re: Volunteers wanted

Postby aokoye » Tue Aug 25, 2015 6:21 pm

The process of getting non profit (501(c)3 in the US) status in the US is a long one and there are a number of things this website needs before attempting to get it. Additionally the organization will also need a board of directors and some serious record keeping (both financially and activity wise).

I've been on a board of directors with one national non-profit and have been rather deeply involved with various others. I personally don't think the non-profit route is one that I would want to go down for this site (because of just how labor intensive it is and because of how new this site is) but I'm glad that you (the mods) are getting professional advice on this. Do not underestimate the amount of work it takes to run a non-profit.
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