Another alternative might be to actually set up an educational 501c3 and do it as an organized charity. I'm on the board of a Makerspace and we ended up doing this. We sent in our paperwork to the IRS in August and received our determination letter in October. It wasn't too bad. For organizations with < $50,000 in funds changing hands every year, the yearly Form 990 tax form is literally an "e-Postcard" type form once you have your determination.
This would be some more work up-front (I can share all the things we went through in my organization to make that happen) and there would need to be a board of directors/officers for organization (I see enough active members of the community between the ECB and S100 sides to fill these positions), but it would solve all of the paperwork issues by making it an actual tax-exempt entity. Selling boards @ cost in support of the mission would be an allowable thing for a 501c3 to do, and people could donate extra beyond the cost of boards and get tax deductions for it.
Anyway, that would be another way to go.
Personally, I'd like to have a solution that increases the availability of the S-100 boards for new people to get into a working system (although the new S-100 Utility board seems poised to get the needed boards for a serial terminal system down to 2 boards) and solves the issues Andrew L is seeing with PayPal. Having members of the community get their own board batches built and distributed is another option, but I kind of worry about that breaking down into chaos (who revises the designs? who keeps track of revisions? etc). There are a couple of boards I would like to have on both the ECB and S-100 sides of the fence that I might do my own 5-board
I'm also willing to take on getting batches of some boards made and distributed, mainly ones that don't need any revision, if it helps Andrew L focus on the ones that need revisions.
Andrew
On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 12:33:30 PM UTC-8, pbirkel wrote:
If I understand the situation correctly, and I'm certainly no financier, it seems as if the only issue is the *volume* of payments that Andrew receives. That could be avoided if:
1. For each new board, appoint a fund-collector ("czar"). Not Andrew.
2. PayPal to fund-collector. When they have accumulated the necessary amount they either send a single PayPal to Andrew or send a personal check (or other fund transfer mechanism).
Andrew sees a *lot* fewer incoming fund transfers. And doesn't have to worry about the funds-incoming tracking.
Assuming that fund collectors rotate, then each would only see 1/Nth the amount of fund-transfers that Andrew does currently, and then serve in that role maybe 1-2 times per year, assuming that N > 6-10.
Andrew doesn't place a board-order until he receives the aggregated-fund transfer. The aggregator presumably trusts Andrew, and each of us trust the aggregator.
Not quite as simple as now, but not particularly more complicated either. And *maybe* it also offloads a bit of the work from Andrew. It certainly ought to reduce the volume of incoming funds transfers for Andrew by a factor of more-or-less 20 (a SWAG on my part). That ought to satisfy PayPal. Or there are personal checks and avoid PayPal entirely/mostly for the second leg of the fund transfer?