Spending guidelines
The CouchSurfing Wiki, an informal workspace which anyone can edit.
This is a page for groupthink about what we think CS should spend it's money on, and work towards useful spending guidelines.
Please reorder and reword these to match what you think our priorities should be:
Contents |
An emergency pool of cash on hand
For technical and legal emergencies, at least $10,000.
A buffer against low donations
We should be able to pay for the servers (and possibly liability insurance) about 6 months in advance.
The Servers
Before we spend money on anything else, we should make sure the servers are covered.
Legal costs
After the servers, our next priority with limited funds is any regular (e.g. insurance) or one-time legal costs for the organization.
Individual stipends for people traveling and doing work for CS
Before any collectives are funded, we seek to maximize the effect of donations by supporting individuals that are traveling doing verifications and other work directly related to CS, under the assumption that it is cheaper to send these individuals some money than it is to fund a collective to try to do the same work.
Work collectives
If we have money left over, we may want to fund collectives to gather certain people to work on CS in physical proximity when otherwise they would be scattered.
Social collectives, Publications & Local Events
We may want to have funds set aside for sponsoring social collectives & local events, encouraging the so-called "couchsurfing spirit" in locales around the earth.
Community-process funds
If any money is left over after these various expenses, we could decide on how to spend it through some community process, perhaps by funding grant proposals which are submitted by community members who want to do something cool and beautiful with CS.
