[school-discuss] Funding opportunities discussion update

[Justin <jriddiough@xxxxxxxxx>]

I want to touch on this some more as it was discussed early August - 

Ideas - 
Joel proposed starting an art gallery and selling merchandise 
Charles Cosse presented ideas he has been working on for awhile relating to a teaching platform for educational game development

I think Joels idea would probably be fun, but I don't think that there would be enough demand to make this an effective use of time.  Besides, he would probably upload his Frankentoons 
http://www.geocities.com/frankentoons/ and get us into all sorts of trouble! ;)  (I think it's a great cause Joel, but I don't think we are set up to address the courts over this)  

Charles idea is very interesting, but SchoolForge itself wouldn't be an appropriate host for this.  There are other projects that this would or could compete with in education, so if this were effective and created income that benefited SchoolForge, there would be a conflict of interest in promoting others Free Software.  


My thoughts..  
Would it be worth it to set up a donation page?  If there is an organization that's trusted by the community that would help to further our goals, perhaps we could work something out to direct the donations to an org like the Free Software Foundation, or Software Freedom Law Center..  I wouldn't imagine that it would be a lot of money donated, but if we did something like this, maybe it would support the organizations that have done a lot of work to pave the way for what we are doing here.  Maybe we could even rotate through donating to different orgs on a monthly basis or something.  Just as long as it's very simple and transparent, and doesn't require a treasurer.. 

Justin