A while ago I asked my boss how he felt about donating some company money to The Perl Foundation. We depend on Perl very much at my company. He was receptive, though we both agreed that because of that current quarter's numbers it wouldn't be a good time to raise the issue. Seeing A new round of TPF grant proposals got me thinking about this again.

The donations page prompts me to earmark the money for one of 4 funds: YAPC Donations, Perl Monks Fund, YAS General Fund, or Perl Development Fund. I looked at the past 12 months donations to each fund, and saw that PerlMonks gets much less than the others: only $295 this year. Surely it must cost more than that to operate the site? Or do we get the physical needs completely taken care of by Pair?

I'd like to donate the money here, if it would go to good use. Does the fact that there's a separate fund for perlmonks reflect some real underlying separation of the budgets, or is it just historical? Am I better off directing the money to the general fund? If the perlmonks fund got some larger donations, what are some ways in which the money might be spent? More hardware? Grants for improving the code? Does this ever come up in discussion? Is there an existing short list of site improvements just waiting to be funded? (Sounds like a fun poll idea.) It might help me persuade my company if I could point to some specific needs and/or later be able to point to a specific result. (Even if they can't directly see their money spent, they could see that community donations funded some specific project and be happy that they were a part of that.)

In reply to Could PerlMonks use some cash? by Anonymous Monk

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