Ask Techlahoma if they'd be willing to be our fiscal sponsor

[dlindahl]

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[dlindahl]

I asked @the-simian and he was agreeable to the proposal, but he needed to bring it before his board members before getting back to us.

An alternative is a new start-up from Tracy Hinds (of CascadiaJS) that is a non-profit looking to support meetup groups nationwide. Not sure on what their timing is though.

[the-simian]

@dlindahl hey thanks for making an issue here! Makes things easier to keep up with.

[dlindahl]

Hey @the-simian, pinging you to see if you've had a chance to discuss this with your board yet. We've got our incorporation filed with the state, by-laws reviewed (pending formal approval), board members defined, and are getting to closer to filing for our Federal status. 🎉 It's happening! 🎉

[the-simian]

Man firstly, great work on your progress. I know how much work this takes, and its not a small thing.

Ah yes, this was brought to a vote by the board at the December meeting, https://github.com/techlahoma/board_meetings/blob/master/2015/12_december_minutes.md#december

The short answer is that after some discussion the board majority vote was no. Here was the reason: we had defined our mission as supporting the grassroots technology community of Oklahoma, and a majority felt that being a fiscal supporter of other states, for now was out of scope (especially while we were still getting our own sea-legs). They also felt like we hadn't fully explored statewide mission. Okc is working well with Tulsa, right now - but we need to improve outreach to places like Lawton, Stillwater and Enid.

On the other hand, the board is really excited by the work you're doing in Sacramento, and still wants to seek other ways we can help each other (and other groups who want to do the same). By that I mean we are currently working to make as much of our material open source as possible, so that others can benefit from it. Of course the first things that come to mind is our bylaws, CoCs, organizational things, meeting notes, and so on. We're also considering simply writing about how we managed to get organized to the point we are, and how to reproduce the results. We're also trying to keep the tools we write open too - for instance Amanda has been working on a Slush generator to scaffold new usergroup sites. There is also a community job board project underway as well.

I'm really impressed with the amount of progress you've made so far. It feels like it took us a lot longer to get to a similar point. Sacramento is very lucky to have you as a community leader. this has all been very new to us, and I feel like we have a long way to go still. Hopefully more areas will follow suit, and this is a positive trend; our network is increasingly strengthened. The folks who benefit in the long run are the community members.

Thank you for again considering us for this. I don't know how else to say it but: I promise the olive branch of collaboration hasn't gone unnoticed. It felt good to know that folks in other areas are trying to achieve similar goals, and we're paying attention. Don't hesitate to reach out to us again for anything.

[jagthedrummer]

Congrats on the quick progress here, @dlindahl! I just wanted to echo @the-simian's point that we'd love to help out in any non-financial ways that we can. We're just early enough in our own process that we're needing to make sure that every dollar we bring in is being put to good use towards our core mission, which is limited to within the state of Oklahoma. We'd love to help you out with figuring out policies and processes, and we'd love to learn from your experiences as you head down a road very similar to ours. Hopefully between Techramento and Techlahoma we can create a good blueprint for other local/state level groups to follow. Keep up the good work!

[dlindahl]

@the-simian and @jagthedrummer

Heyo! This took way too long to respond to. Life, right?

Thank you so much for considering our proposal! Turns out we got our federal status way faster than we ever would have expected and we're already well on our way to officially launching. So turns out, not having you as a fiscal sponsor ended up not being all that necessary.

We are also trying to open source as much as we can, so if there is anything in our repos you have questions or insight about, we'd love to hear it! And if you have anything you'd like to highlight on your end, same deal!

One question I do have is how you handle distribution of funds to your various efforts. Aside from self-run conferences, how do meetups, etc. benefit financialy from the money raised by Techlahoma? We discussed this today and came up with what we think is a pretty simple plan (submit a budget, send us receipts, we'll reimburse), but since you've been doing this a lot longer than we have, I'm curious to see what your process is.

One thing that I'd like to share back with you is the number of non-profit pricing plans for various services that you may need:

• Slack will upgrade your account to the Standard Plan up to 250 members and 85% off above that

  https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833

• Stripe provides a reduced percentage (2.2% vs 2.9%) plus waived fees for your first $15k or first year

  Email [email protected] for more info (Need EIN and IRS letter)

• Google provides full Google App access for free

  https://www.google.com/nonprofits/products/

• Google AdWords provides $10k in AdWords with an option of upgrading to $40k

  https://www.google.com/grants/

• GitHub has a non-profit plan for unlimited users and private repos

  https://github.com/nonprofit

• 1Password is experimenting with non-profit pricing

  Email [email protected]

• Tito has started to investigate non-profit pricing

  Contact Paul Campbell for more information

Again, thanks so much for considering us and your kind words. We look forward to sharing our progress going forward and comparing notes as we work to make our communities as awesome as they should be!