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.)

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Re: Could PerlMonks use some cash? (naw)
by tye (Sage) on Aug 04, 2008 at 04:13 UTC

    Perhaps somebody who knows more about "money things" will speak up, but, no, I don't think PerlMonks would know what to do with some cash at this point. But I encourage you to donate to Perl6 development (or perhaps some other Perl project).

    The money in the PerlMonks fund is still sitting in the PerlMonks fund. We recently looked for things to do with that money regarding site performance. On one level it was too little for some things we considered but more importantly, the less drastic things were completely free for us and were less risky and so that is the direction we are going. This work will likely bear fruit in the next month or few with greatly improved site performance and stability.

    Actually, as an indirect result of this work (and somebody -- sorry, I don't recall who -- at OSCON prompting me to look again at memory usage on the DB server) I made some changes and had pair.com make some changes on our current DB server that have already returned the site to mostly reasonable performance and reliability again (it still "goes to lunch" when certain memory-hungry operations are done as part of preparing for the move to new hardware).

    pair.com provides us with free hosting (we don't pay for the multiple computers that we monopolize nor the several hardware replacements that have happened nor bandwidth nor the 24-hour monitoring and support). They get free advertising in exchange. I'm not sure how that totals out on the balance sheets (since the advertising is mostly for pair.com itself so far, the balancing is surely rather virtual so I consider it quite charitable of them).

    The other possibility is to pay people for doing some work on PerlMonks. I don't feel like taking the time right now to address this in any detail, but I also find that unlikely to happen in the near term for quite a few reasons.

    BTW, I and several others did some research into changing to different hosting arrangements which lead me to find that PerlMonks might be able to sell ads and actually fund our own hosting from ad revenue (which surprised me), but it is nice to not have to risk going down that road at this point.

    Many thanks to pair.com, The Perl Foundation, and to vroom.

    - tye        

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      *cough*cough* PerlMonks NorthAmerica BBQ
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Re: Could PerlMonks use some cash?
by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Aug 04, 2008 at 13:32 UTC
    Anonymous Monk,
    I understand the desire to give back to the community, and specifically this site. As tye points out, donating to the PerlMonks fund would not likely return any visible benefit. While this was not your question, the next logical step then becomes - then where should we donate?

    Donating to TPF will result in your money being put to good use and it is tax deductible. Personally, I want more control over who and/or what my money goes to. While the TPF donation structure is changing to support more focused donations, it doesn't yet satisfy my taste. For this reason, I hang out here, on #perl, #perl6, and #parrot. When I hear of a stalled project or person due to lack of funds, I make arrangements to make a financial contribution directly. It results in no tax break, but I feel better about knowing where and how I made a difference.

    Some companies, such as Stonehenge Consulting owned by merlyn, privately fund people to work on stuff. If there is a specific project that your company benefits from, perhaps that is what you might want to do. No matter what you and your company decide, the community will benefit from the contribution so if you can - give.

    It feels good.

    Cheers - L~R

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Re: Could PerlMonks use some cash?
by cbrandtbuffalo (Deacon) on Aug 04, 2008 at 16:27 UTC
    Indeed this conversation came up recently as we (TPF and the PerlMonks admins) were discussing some things to do with the PerlMonks funds we have. The first and most obvious use was to beef up the hardware to speed things up a bit. I contacted Pair and they very generously spec'd out some new boxes. The PerlMonks admins are currently in the early stages of working on an upgrade.

    To answer your other question, yes, Pair donates their hosting and they run an ad on the site. Pair has been absolutely fantastic in this regard. They have given us nice hardware, they keep the site up and running 24x7, and they handle our support requests very quickly.

    So for funding, I agree with the others that a PerlMonks donation is unlikely to get used right away. However, if you follow the TPF grants that have been awarded and you support the work we are funding, that money will get used. You can find more on what we've been up to here: TPF 2008 report.
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