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Sunday, August 30, 2009

Up early, thinking about how to commercialize LiLAX. After running this group for half a decade, maybe it is time to turn it into a commercial venture to better bring out value to the members. I think for a start I will compensate speakers, and charge it to the members. People want to make money, that is a given, we have been meeting for a while and know each other, most are retired, so they can be advisers, investors or just step to the sidelines and make snide comments. But some of those that left, may come back of there is a financial incentive, if they can make a living at this group. For me there is a motivation to continue if there could be a house down in the future for me. We have been talking about leaving the area, finding a house somewhere, we can just pay cash for it, but what if we can find a way to make the money to stay put in this area?

So some of the things I have been thinking about are building out a community network, something that will involve money at some point, but also requires lots of people to cooperate with the network, once the network is up we can put all kinds of services on it. I think last month's meeting about Honduras and what Eng. w/o bourders did there was a great intro to what we can do right here if we all get together in a cooperative maner like the internet when it was initially started, it was all about comunicating with each other. We can get some pretty cheap bandwidth to connect to the rest of the world.

3 comments:

Sarolite said...

The proper way to do it is to get your 503(c) non-profit status. You can then open a bank account, write checks from it, collect dues, etc. A group with officers and bylaws is more likely to stand the test of time than some guys who get together for grub once in a while. ;)

RalfEriX said...

maybe someday it could be of a size where the expenses of a 503c can be justified, right now it is more of a passing the hat around for the speaker kind of group, or we buy them lunch, until we can get the quality up, which will probably take anther 5 years before a 503c can be expensed.

Anonymous said...

I dunno.... any time money is involved things get very complicated.

I certainly won't contribute money to anything that isn't a non profit.

It's messy.

Do you plan to issue receipts to everyone so it can be expensed?

Incorporating as a 503c is the right way to go.

I strongly urge you to keep the general meetings as is, and we can have our other (private party, invite only, very exclusive membership) meeting as discussed over the weekend.