On 2018 M07 5, Thu 09:54:02 CEST Simon Lees wrote:
As I mentioned in a previous email last year google offered to sponsor openSUSE in order to to send some people involved in GSoC to an event, at the time SUSE's budgets were frozen and they were unable to accept / use this money on openSUSE's behalf and as a result people missed out on traveling to an event that would have been fully paid for. The board is very keen to ensure that such a situation does not happen again and that we have an alternative way of accepting the sponsorship. Even if this alternative way is only ever used sparingly in cases when SUSE can't accept the money for whatever reason or in cases where I third party doesn't want to donate via SUSE because they have no way of confirming the money they donate will actually be spent on openSUSE.
Even with an umbrella organization there is admistrative overhead and things
might be slow or complicated. I went through this a few times with projects in
the context of KDE. Moving to umbrella organizations and back. What I can say
is that this is the type of work you want to minimize. Your capacity as board
is limited, especially as you are all volunteers. So I would recommend to
choose wisely what you spend your time on.
I'm also sure that there are still things to be optimized with SUSE. Maybe
that's more effective. If external sponsorship would allow to increase the
openSUSE budget by 50% or 100% or something like that, it would probably be
worth to find an alternative setup but if it's a small number other activities
might give you a better return.
--
Cornelius Schumacher