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Helping PlanetMath |
PlanetMath needs your help! While we have been a great success in producing mathematical content through the volunteer work of the community, our resources have fallen distressingly short of needs in terms of delivery and development. In specific, we'd like to hire people to various extents to:
Right now, as much as any of these things are done, they are done in what little volunteer time a few people can spare and are therefore lacking greatly in consistency and scale. Currently we pull in about $5000/yr from ads and donations; we figure we need about $40,000/yr to really start hiring people (at first, either a developer/admin or part time of each). Our near-term target for public donations, however, is $10,000/yr, and we are about a third of the way there.
We need your help to improve quality of service of PlanetMath and continue to help the software and community grow and evolve. We hope that, if you feel PlanetMath is a great resource, you will consider one of the following forms of assistance.
Note: PlanetMath is a US-based nonprofit corporation, "PlanetMath.org, Ltd.", incorporated in Alexandria, Virginia. It is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt public charity, so donations from US residents are tax-deductable!
We have just begun a subscription memberships system, through which you can financially support the PlanetMath organization and community on an ongoing basis (click the previous link to enter the system).
There are perks to supporting financially in this manner:
We strongly encourage friends of PlanetMath who believe in free knowledge (in all senses) for mathematics (and beyond) to become a member, at least at the minimum level ($20/yr). A steady revenue stream holds the promise of a much greater ability of the PlanetMath community to sustain, grow, develop and attain much greater impact.
One time donations can also be performed via PayPal (which also accepts credit) through the above system, or via one of the methods described below.
Liquid cash is probably the best way to help us out, because we can turn it into most anything else we need to improve the delivery and development of PlanetMath. We are open to large-scale grants from nonprofit and government organizations or private corporations, private and public sponsorship arrangements, and private donations from individuals. Though we don't have a formal monetary-base membership arrangement for the PlanetMath.org, Ltd. corporation (for now), we suggest a standard yearly donation of $20US-$100US for individuals who are able and use PlanetMath regularly or just want to support the effort.
You can actually get money to us as follows:
PlanetMath Donations
C/O Bonnie Rabichow
4336 Birchlake Ct.
Alexandria, VA 22309
USA
Get matching donations. Many employers will match donations made by their employees to registered tax-exempt public charities. This is a very easy way to increase the power of your donations. By how much? Before we were tax-exempt and employers couldn't match donations, a dollar donated was a dollar towards PlanetMath. Now, since you can write off your donation and get your employer will match it, every (approx.) 2/3 dollar is two dollars for PlanetMath. In other words, each real dollar you contribute is three for PlanetMath (given matching and standard tax assumptions)!
Find out if your employer has a program like this, and give the handler your proof of contribution and our tax identification number 42-1605465 when you make a donation.
This also has the added benefit of spreading the word about PlanetMath to all who see your PlanetMath gear (however, keep in mind we only get a small slice of the sale price).
We think that this type of support has the potential to enable more forward-thinking development of PlanetMath/Noosphere and collaborative digital libraries in general. If you are interested in funding research and development in this area, please get in touch with us.
Donations of facilities or hardware may be useful to us, depending on the specifics of the situation. Small-scale hardware, such as spare, stand-alone home or home-office computers, will probably not be useful to us. However, we would eagerly consider grants of rack-mountable, mid- to large-scale multiprocessing or clustering systems.
Volunteering your time and expertise is a great way to help out. We are looking for people who can code and want to help fix bugs and optimize PlanetMath and the Noosphere system (as well as to extend them). We chiefly use Perl at the moment, but we can usually make use of good coders who don't work in that language. We are also interested in ideas for improving PlanetMath's architecture to make it more elegant, efficient, maintainable, extensible, and scalable.
We encourage all prospective volunteers to join in the activities on our planning and coordination wiki, AsteroidMeta. Here are the PlanetMath and Noosphere sections.
Please send inquiries about any of the above methods of assistance to feedback@planetmath.org. Volunteers should check out the collaboration wiki mentioned immediately above. Thanks in advance!