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Originally posted by Scott Jensen
As for getting sponsors for this project, you could set up a charity for it along the lines of one I was working to set up for Folding@Home. Basically, a booster club for your project. Your current volunteers donating via monthly automated credit card deductions. The money from this could be used to send out inexpensive postcards to recruit more volunteers. The idea being that some of the ones those postcards recruit will turn around and also become patrons. The desired effect is a snowball rolling down a snowy slope. Once this revenue generates enough money, the booster club would hire someone to walk around and knock on doors. The doors I'd have that person knock on would be corporate and seek corporate donations to the booster club. As this revenue increases, more and more people would be hired to knock on more and more doors. With each new hire, the world is further divided up so each territory they cover gets smaller and smaller. Smaller means they can cover it more thoroughly. Initially, I'd have the first hire be in North America. Second hire in either Europe or Japan. Third hire be for the area that wasn't covered by the second hire. Eventually, the booster club could have one for each country in the world and for the major countries, for each state/province. Each of these workers going around and talking to corporations, universities, school systems, non-profit organizations, social organizations, hospitals, etc. And part of their job is to keep the ones they bring in to remain in. Keeping volunteers and keeping them crunching is the key to success. In fact, after a little bit, these workers would mainly be going around giving updates to the organizations they've already brought in and doing the necessary patting-on-the-back to keep them in.
Is it just me, or does this sound suspiciously like a pyramid scheme :D
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Now could I set up that charity (a.k.a. booster club) for you? Yes, but not out of my own pocket as I did with Folding@Home. I got burned by Stanford and don't want to do that again. And I wasn't the only one to get burned. A very nice lawyer did as well. A lawyer I'd like to use again, but I'm almost positive she'll expect cold hard cash upfront before she does this a second time. And it isn't cheap. Incoporation costs $1,000, tax-exempt status costs $10,000, and that doesn't include the costs of a single postcard mailed out. Any millionaire volunteers like to contribute to the cause? :) On the other hand, Howard (or more likely, Chris ... since he's your professor) could you ask for a grant to set up this charity and possibly at least one hire and operating expenses for one year? Afterall, how valuable a dc project amounts to is largely based on how many volunteers it has crunching for it. The above proposed booster club would very likely do the trick more than anything else.
Scott,