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FME 2012 News and Safe Software Major Donation

Tue, 2012/01/24 - 15:39 — Satri

I am extremely happy to report that Safe Software, the makers of the popular FME spatial ETL tool, have made a big donation to Slashgeo.org - thank you Safe Software! They're taking the sweet spot of being #1 on our top donors list (on the right-hand column).

Here's what might interest you regarding FME 2012:

  • Contest called "Geography Jones and the Temple of Data", open until Friday which has prizes like an iPad2 and $1500 in travel up for grabs
  • Webinar that will describe what's new and great in FME 2012, offered three times on January 26
  • Details on what's new in FME Desktop and FME Server
  • Blog posts on FME 2012, LiDAR, Google Fusion Tables and more to come later this week

We mentioned FME several times since 2006. In addition to this donation, Safe Software also paid for advertising exclusivity on Slashgeo.org for a few months (the top banner). Slashgeo is managed by a registered non-profit organization. You can learn more about getting exposure on Slashgeo.

Don't worry, we're not filthy rich now ;-) Despite this welcomed donation, our budget is still far in the red because of hosting and maintenance fees accumulated since 2005 (this doesn't count hundreds of hours spent by our team of volunteers). You can peak at our open budget while it's still there. I'll have to remove it in order to respect the Google terms of service (we already got trouble with them in the past).

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Wed, 2012/01/25 - 12:37 — Anonymous

Open Budget

Satri, could you please speak a bit more about specifically why you have to remove the open budget? What service term(s) are being violated? Today is the first time I've been aware of it, and it's something I'd like to see more of in this world, not less!

Taking a new branch on the financial theme, consider adding http://flattr.com/ to the methods  people can contribute to Slashgeo.

Wed, 2012/01/25 - 15:46 — Satri

Re: Open Budget

We started running Google AdSense ads last year, the goal wasn't to make loads of money, but rather to help pay the hosting bills. I've been paying the bills  with my personal money since 2005 and that's not a problem at all, *but*, I'd like Slashgeo to become self-sustained. At the moment, the priority for self-sustainability is not the money, but community contributions in terms of geonews aggregation (yes, that famous "Submit geonews" button ;-). It's not a blatant success so far (but rest reassured, I'll keep not-sleeping-enough-with-a-smile to keep the site alive ;- ). Now back to your question, I've been told (but I'm not certain if I validated or not) that Google AdSense's ToS specifically prohibits sharing anything about the success or not of using Google AdSense. Keeping our 'open budget' in concordance with reality would mean including AdSense revenues, but I apparently can't without breaking the Google AdSense ToS. I already had trouble with AdSense and it caused me a lot of personal troubles, that's why I want to play by the rules and stay on the safe side. Does that make sense? Any suggestions?

Thanks for the flattr suggestion. I'll think about it, really, and maybe try it for some time. Slashgeo suffers from being a side-project. I have only very little time to devote to the project, and mostly all of that time goes to geonews aggregation at the moment. That's why exploring opportunities like flattr has not been tested before.

Thanks for your feedback! :-) -- Alex aka Satri

Thu, 2012/01/26 - 12:12 — Anonymous

Re: Open Budget

"...ToS specifically prohibits sharing anything about the success or not of using Google AdSense." Whoa, that's a strange restriction. Still, license terms are often embedded with truly strange ideas. I can understand why you'd want to be cautious, and keep your attention and energy pointed in the same direction that got Slashgeo started.      

I'm still sorry that it could kill the Open Budget reporting. The only suggestion I have at the moment is that AdSense revenues by lumped in under "unattributed contributions". Actually that might be a good category to have anyway. There are donors who don't like to be named or highlighted and I've seen a lot of non-profits with an "anonymous donor" category (though in this case I would steer clear of the word "donor" for ad revenue).

Fri, 2012/01/27 - 08:14 — Satri

Re: Open Budget

That's an interesting possibility. I guess I can keep the open budget by adding a new type of revenues which would be "Other revenues", as you propose, which would include "several things" the Google AdSense and Flattr revenues, thus hiding to the world the exact value of Google AdSense revenues (but still sharing the ballpark figure). That would keep the open budget alive. I'll really have to review the Google Terms of Service before doing so to ensure I'm not breaking their rules.

Thanks for the idea! :-)

Thu, 2012/01/26 - 12:42 — Anonymous

Re: Open Budget

here is the Slahsgeo Flattr page, based on your twitter feed:
https://flattr.com/thing/426134/slashgeo-on-Twitter. Oh look at that, it's already been used a couple of times. 

Use the "claim it now" link at right to tie it to yourself. I'm not sure what happens after that, I've never collected revenue from Flattr, only given it away. ;-)

Fri, 2012/01/27 - 08:17 — Satri

Re: Open Budget

Hey! Thanks! :-) It is claimed now­. I'll try to configure the whole thing this weekend. There is a Flattr module for Drupal, but it's not maintained. Maybe it works? I'll try it. Cheers -

Wed, 2012/01/25 - 16:23 — Anonymous

Re: FME 2012 News and Safe Software Major Donation

Thanks Satri for the kind words, we're very glad to be able to support your work. I know firsthand that Slashgeo is widely read here at Safe and amongst many of our customers.  Thanks to you and your volunteers for your efforts.

Dale

Thu, 2012/01/26 - 08:09 — Satri

Re: FME 2012 News and Safe Software Major Donation

Thanks to you Dale! This is really appreciated. As a metric, we do have over 7k RSS subscribers, but we rarely hear from them. It's hard for us to assess to which extent those efforts are worth. That's why your encouragements are so welcomed :-)

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