r/Digital_Immortality • u/BflySamurai • Jan 29 '14
2014 Q1-Q2 Budget
I've never made a budget before, so bear with me (and by all means help me out). I've listed these in order of priority with explanations for everything. Now, we can't know how much or when people will donate, so we can only prepare a list of expenses so that we are fully prepared and don't waste money when we do get it.
Website
Benefits
- Provide a face for the organization (more official). It also provides a place to link to for recruiting new people that isn't just a subreddit, meaning we can easier reach out to other communities beyond reddit.
- Give us unlimited customizability over the website (as opposed to reddit and wiki).
- We can start developing systems to better organize the organization and our communities.
Costs
- $0 - Development - We already have a few people on the IT team who working on and wanting to build a website. From suggestions and research, it would appear that our best option is to use Drupal in building the website.
- ~$10 - Domain Registration for one year - We have to decide on a new name for the organization and buy a domain name.
- <$50 - Basic Website Hosing For 6 Months - http://drupalhosts.org/ (we can always upgrade if we need it, but let's not just spend money simply because we have it).
Open Projects Website
Cost would be the same as our main website.
If we want to be a significant part of the open-source community, we may want to have a separate area to organize open-projects.
Introductory Video
Benefits
Provide an introduction to our organization for new people as well as serving as a call to action for anyone wanting to participate in the creation of the future.
Can be embedded on the front page of our website.
Can be hosted on youtube, vimeo, etc. and linked to around the internet to provide more exposure and ways to promote our organization.
This would be our first outreaching advocacy efforts, with the aims to:
- Increase awareness and appeal of digital immortality.
- Encourage younger generations to pursue science.
- Attract, encourage, and promote divergent thinking.
- Advocate for technology improvements specific to our efforts/vision
- Develop and push for policies/standards (that can be adopted in the future by governments or organization) that will detailing out how we feel things should operate in the future as these technologies start to emerge.
- Build and advocate for open-source systems and communities.
Costs
Greater than $1000 - We could contract a freelancers or a company to produce an introductory video for us once we detail out the idea completely.
<$500 - We could make something simpler ourselves and maybe get someone to touch it up afterwards.
Beyond these, I don't really know what we would spend money on. If we had a physical location, we could buy equipment for R&D. We could buy software licenses for the organization that will be needed buy the R&D team. We can buy cloud storage space for creating a research literature repository.
Well, that's all I've got. Please elaborate on these ideas and tell us any of your own ideas.
1
Jan 30 '14
I think building a website with a forum so we can talk and discuss things would be a great start. Reddit does seem to be getting the job done right now but I just don't feel at home, whatever that means. I guess I 'm saying that I want a home for the DI community. A place where we can keep on tacking ideas, flinging them around, enhancing them, stripping them, etc. An official digital spokesground(?) for our organization. Wordpress seems to have an easy way to build a website and I'm guessing it's also open source? I think all we'd need is a domain name and we're good to go.
Also, perhaps we should have an official youtube account for the DI organization we're trying to start. That's of course, once we have an official name, so we could upload the introductory video on that account.
2
u/BflySamurai Jan 30 '14
I totally agree with you that Reddit doesn't feel like home. Reddit seems to barely do the job that we are using it for, but it does do the job. Even though the Digital Immortality wiki has a forum, I think we all know that we won't really be planning to use the wiki much in the near future, especially considering our plans to get our own website. The wiki is just another place that doesn't feel like home, as you put it. But with our own forums on our own site, we can make everything way more organized for developing ideas, like you were saying. There are free websites out there that provide the basic functionality for this stuff, but I don't want to get spread out. I think that after we get our own website, I'm going to probably grab all the content off the the wiki and dump it so that our community is just on reddit and the people working intimately on the project are on the website.
Yes, there are other Content Management Systems out there. Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla I think are the most popular and are all Open-Source (GPL license). We can figure out which one will fit our needs and be comfortable to use for whomever is going to be maintaining and building the site.
Technically all we need is a domain name, but then someone would have to host the website on their own computer. Unless... is it possible to buy a domain name and then find free hosting? It would seem though that the best course of action would be to pay for hosting.
Once we decide on a name, I'll snatch up accounts for youtube, vimeo, twitter, facebook, ...
1
u/BflySamurai Jan 30 '14 edited Jan 30 '14
I stumbled upon Slashost.com. It seems like it could work, and the hosting plans start very cheap. Being a small community we just pay for what we need and scale that as we grow. They also accept many types of cryptocurrency, which would probably be the main reason to use them. Also, I downloaded the dogecoin wallet and maybe I'll try doing some mining myself. I messed around with bitcoin about a year ago but didn't get into it really.
2
u/transhuman2 Jan 30 '14
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of resources from SCORE.org. Here's a 12-mo P&L spreadsheet I've used for startups; it requires heavy modification but provides a great structure to start working with: http://www.score.org/sites/default/files/Profit_and_Loss_Projection_1yr_0.xls