[Linux-aus] Donations (was The Ada Initiative)

[Donna Benjamin]

On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 22:53 -0600, James Turnbull wrote:
> Since at least 2008 (and perhaps
> earlier) LA or the LCA team in conjunction with LA has made a donation
> to the charity of choice for LCA of that year.  In 2008 for example LA
> made a donation of 10K to the Little Penguin Foundation to supplement
> the money raised during the conference. 

Actually - no James, that's not right either. LCA2008 decided not to
hold a charity auction for a couple of reasons.
 1. Our venue wasn't conducive to speechifying.
 2. I hate the charity auction.

Instead, we ran a kind of raffle. Rusty's raffle. He devised some kind
of complex algorithm to maximise dollars received for the raffle.

By the time the conference came along, we had opened up the "keynote
only" tickets due to selling out 6 weeks prior to opening. This meant we
were making a very very tidy surplus. So we decided we should top up the
proceeds of the charity contribution to the sum of $10,000 - out of the
LCA surplus. This was meant to come from our budget.

LA didn't get round to honouring that payment to the Little Penguin
Foundation for quite some time. We could not make that payment directly,
because LA never gave the LCA08 team access to bank accounts.

So in 2008 - LA did not make a charity donation. At all.

-- 
http://linux.conf.au/

linux.conf.au     Donna Benjamin
MEL8OURNE2008     Conference Director 
28Jan - 02Feb     donna at mel8ourne.org