On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 10:40:54AM +0530, Raju Mathur wrote:
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I agree with most of what you're saying, except:
"Ram" == Ramanraj K <Ramanraj> writes:
Ram> [snip] Ram> E gov software is worth about Rs. 1400 Crores per annum in Ram> India. Surely, much of e gov software could be built from Ram> the free software directory, and for utilising free software, Ram> the gov could doante anything from Rs. 10 to Rs.100 crores, Ram> to start with. These would enable FSF India to have its own Ram> hardware, mirroring facilities, state of the art distros, and Ram> provide fair compensation to developers who maintain the free Ram> software pool in good shape. The gov could save more than Ram> Rs.1000 crores or use it to meet infrastructure needs. Ram> Individuals or private entities would seldom be able to match Ram> the gov in funding and the gov has no other viable software Ram> source for its needs.Before anyone starts talking about donating to FSF (India or anywhere), please, once again, consider releasing the following information to the public:
- Directors, board members and office holders of FSF India
- Salaries and allowances (if any)
- Statement of accounts for the last financial year
- Clear list of activities in which donated money will be invested
- Articles of association
List of board members is there on the fsf india page. None of the directors/board members get any salary. (the memorandm clearly says so by constitution). List of activities: too many to be listed. FSF India doesn't have money to print brochures to be sent to all the units in the country, send letters by post to a list of people whenever we want, no capital to print books, etc. (We already have a book to print urgently, a book in bangla written by DipankarDa) this book needs a budget of 100K we have only about 40k in the treasury). Most of the activities like meetings, workshops etc that a few of the volunteers are doing needs particularly for travel, boarding and lodging. FSFI spent around 15k for the Delhi event last year. We havent recovered that money. We attended meetings when Govts called us. We need money for travel in this way for such occassions. Several events in the country are ready to involve FSFI, but FSFI has no budjet to send speakers to those events. FSFI hired temporarily for a few months for a project FSFI did for Keltron. Lot of goodies, like stickers, hats, t-shirts need capital to print. We have no money to make a set of CDs for distribution while on advocacy activities. We need at least one full timer in Trivandrum and another in Mumbai. Web page maintenance is done completely voluntarily till now. But we do need a staff to do this. We wish to begin Membership program (associate membership) but cannot start in time since we have resource problems. We need money to get gnu.org web page translated in Indian languages (nine languages). To pay for nine good expert translators for so much of content on that very important site we need lot of money. Any sponsors. If we have more meney FSFI can have one person working for FSFI in each of the important locations in the country. We need money for compensate for that. BTW, these people cannot be part of the board (by constitution). When we some office support of this kind we can do several other things (including publishing summary of accounts etc.) One of our board members (you can guess who) at Trivandrum is single handedly working for the office keeping his career aspirations at stake. We want to do all this. At present, FSFI as a just born child needs nurturing, you can begin demanding when it grows. We also need someone to write all these requirements and put it up on the web page, I mean we want content developers (writers) for FSF India web page.
Articles of association is there on the webpage. How could you miss front page links? If you read carefully the memorandum, most of the items listed there need more human resource, all of which cannot be taken care by only voluntary means, since some of them need regular attention.
Most urgent: we need at least two full timers one at Trivandrum and another at Mumbai to run the office on a day to day basis, which means a minimum of 300k per year. (this amount is not for salary alone, but also to manage the office and accommodation of the persons). Any sponsors?
Nagarjuna