Sign up for Flattr

[nwtn]

I suggest the RICG sign up for Flattr (https://flattr.com/). Considering how many faves each tweet gets, it might be possible to generate some (though admittedly not much) revenue for travel, etc.

[marcoscaceres]

What did you have in mind? Would we put this on the home page?

[nwtn]

I hadn't thought of that, though we could. I was just thinking of tweets: if people are signed up for Flattr, they can donate to tweets they like by fav'ing them in Twitter (if they have the correct app privileges setup), using a browser extension, or using a bookmarklet. It's entirely possible there are already "unclaimed" Flattr donations for @respimg just from people doing that.

If we added something to the home page, they could also Flattr responsiveimages.org directly. I don't like that idea as much, because it seems like asking for donations, which I find is a potentially weird line. The Twitter thing is just making it possible to receive stuff that people are maybe donating anyway, without us asking.

[marcoscaceres]

Cool. Thanks for the clarification - sorry about the n00b questions. You wanna set this up for twitter?

[nwtn]

Ha, dude, we're all newbs at something. I just started looking into this Flattr thing last week, and thought it sounded cool.

Anyway, happy to set it up, but I'd need access to the Twitter. Do you have that? Or @Wilto can you set me up with that?

[Wilto]

Ehh, I dunno about mixing donations into this whole thing just yet. I vote we hold off for now; I’m doing some thinking on this subject right now anyway.

[anselmh]

It seems to be a no-brainer to set this up. Still, I am not sure if we should do so. I do think this is up to the one paying for the domain as he should deserve the money in that case (IMO).

[marcoscaceres]

It's not a big deal if we have this or not. The costs for me personally on RICG so far have been around EU1100 over the last year (TPAC, Web Perf Days, hosting, vimeo, tshirts, etc.). I doubt we will be able to recover most of that - but I think it's money well spent nonetheless. If the flattr thing is unobtrusive, then we might as well just do it.

As I said above, I don't know anything about Flattr so I'll leave it to others to make the call on this.

[nwtn]

@Wilto have you looked at the Flattr model, or are you objecting to the idea of donations in general? Generally speaking, I think that requesting donations can be distasteful (not always, but enough that I'd be very cautious about it), but this is really more about just claiming donations people may have already made, not actually requesting anything.

[Wilto]

@nwtn I’m a little leery of donations in general, anything that claims to “something-something-social-media” even moreso.

I wouldn’t mind having more chips in the game, though—set a few people up with W3C member accounts, provide travel/conference reimbursement, that sort of thing. We don’t want sponsors for obvious reasons and Flattr seems a little gimmick-y… I’m wondering if maybe we want to set up a https://www.wepay.com account or something, tack a “donation” button on the site, and see where that goes? We’re a community project, so community funding makes sense.

What scares me is all the tax business that comes with taking donations: either setting up a 501c3, or handling all income/taxes through a single individual. But, that said, I’m totally willing to jump on that grenade.

@marcoscaceres, @yoavweiss, @nwtn, @anselmh, er’rybody else:
Could you shoot me an email with roughly however much you’ve spent on RICG business, out-of-pocket? Nothing formal; just wanna know what we’re working with, here.

[marcoscaceres]

Closin'