# Use of Sponsorship Money and Governance

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [April 12, 2015, 8:19pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258 "2015-04-12T20:19:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 10\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Sebastian\_Karcher](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/sebastian_karcher/32/176_2.png) [@Sebastian\_Karcher](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sebastian_Karcher)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 8:19pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/1 "2015-04-12T20:19:13Z")

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Hi all,  
this post has two parts: it starts with a suggested budget for the use of  
sponsorship money we have/will receive(d) this year, then some brief more  
general considerations on governance. So if you don’t care about the  
former, please scroll down. We have received the money from Springer/Papers  
and are waiting for the check from Elsevier/Mendeley, which should arrive  
any time.

This is Rintze and my budget proposal:

Donations 2014 + $5000  
Rintze - $1962.94  
Sebastian - $1950  
Stickers - $72.96

- taxes 2014: $1410\*—
- 395.90

## Donations 2015 $10,000

- 1,200 (d) (Sylvester for submission bot)
- 3,150 (Rintze, Sebastian, 1,575 each)
- 400 (d?) (Phillip - proposed)
- 165 (d) (style manuals)\*\*
- 396 (“deficit” 2014)
- 2460 (est. taxes 2015) (10,000-anything I can tax deduct)\*.285

* * *

2015 Budgeted “surplus”: $2,229

(d) signifies tax deductible for me

Let me know if anything looks wrong or you have any questions, on or off  
list is fine.  
Three questions in ascending order of generality:

1. Is everyone OK with this? Suggested changes, objections?
2. What should we do with the $2,229 currently left? I’d love to support  
Frank’s work in some way, so Frank if there’s anything we can do–pay for  
server or the like–please let us know. Beyond that, any other ideas? Both  
donations are no-strings-attached, so we can do anything that’s useful for  
CSL: Fund travel to conferences/talks or face-to-face meetings, fund/bounty  
additional CSL-related development. Thoughts, ideas?
3. Rintze and I both feel that some type of governance would make sense now  
that we deal with non-trivial amounts of money. At the same time, time is  
one of our scarcest resources, so we shouldn’t do anything that places any  
undue burden on that. Rintze suggested something like this:

we could create a governing board, whose role is to annually articulate

> short and long-term goals of the CSL project (with community input), and  
> make decisions on how these goals can be best achieved with the available  
> funds. (…) We could have a poll every year or two for the board positions.

We could, alternatively, just keep running this entirely through the list  
and on a consensus basis, which has worked pretty well, but I am a little  
worried that we don’t have any mechanism in place at all should there be  
some type of conflict.

Looking forward to hearing people’s thoughts, especially on 2 and 3.  
Sebastian

- a little under 15% each for income and self-employment tax  
\*\* specifically: CMoS subscription: $60 for 2 years (d)  
Australian Gov’t Style Manaual $50 (d)  
Duden Schriftliche Arbeit $15 (d)  
SBL Style Manual 2nd Edition $40 (d)

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**Author:** ![Martin\_Fenner1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8491ac/32.png) [@Martin\_Fenner1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Martin_Fenner1)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 8:48pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/2 "2015-04-12T20:48:31Z")

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My two cents as someone only peripherally involved: thinking about some level of governance feels like the right direction, as CSL has become an essential part of the scholarly infrastructure.

Best,

Martin\> Am 12.04.2015 um 22:19 schrieb Sebastian Karcher \<@Sebastian\_Karcher\>:

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 9:44pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/3 "2015-04-12T21:44:37Z")

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Agreed. I guess the obvious question is what that should look like.  
Perhaps something like Rintze suggests, along with a simple governance  
document that articulates that all?

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**Author:** ![Frank\_Bennett](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/frank_bennett/32/198_2.png) [@Frank\_Bennett](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Frank_Bennett)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 10:14pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/4 "2015-04-12T22:14:37Z")

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Governance is good.

It would be great if CSL could cover the costs I incur in connection  
with project hosting. They arise from work on MLZ (to be rebranded in  
due course as “Juris-M”). The justification would be that Juris-M  
development explores territory in law and multilingual referencing  
into which CSL may eventually move. I’m not sure everyone is  
comfortable with that logic.

The costs would be small. From memory, it’s something like this:

1. SSL certificate: $15.95
2. Shared Hosting: ~$70.00
3. DNS reg: ~$10.00

The cert at (1) will be installed on a University server that I use to  
negotiate OAuth connections to GitHub from [https://juris-m.github.io](https://juris-m.github.io).  
The server is currently running with a cert issued by the UPKI center  
in the National Institute for Informatics (NII), a free service to  
Japanese universities. The service will be terminated in June, and  
there is apparently to be no replacement, neither at the NII nor in  
our university.

With OAuth authentication, the Juris-M code editor can submit  
one-click pull requests to any GitHub repo. The site is currently  
bound to the legal style modules repo, but could be extended to direct  
mainstream CSL styles to the CSL repo, if that is desired.

The hosting at (2) is for the [http://citationstylist.org](http://citationstylist.org) domain and  
server. I plan to migrate this content to Juris-M on GitHub in a  
general housecleaning, but the DNS reg will need to be maintained for  
a time to handle redirects.

The DNS reg at (3) is for the [gsl-nagoya-u.net](http://gsl-nagoya-u.net) domain, which currently  
serves the MLZ xpi and some documentation - it is no longer used by  
our faculty, and I have de facto control over the domain. It will also  
need to be maintained for a time, again for the general migration to  
the new Juris-M space on GitHub.

That’s the rough run-down, I can dig out receipts when needed. Once a  
mode of decision-making is agreed, I’ll follow the group’s decision on  
whether these costs are in-scope.

Frank

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**Author:** ![Sebastian\_Karcher](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/sebastian_karcher/32/176_2.png) [@Sebastian\_Karcher](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sebastian_Karcher)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 10:31pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/5 "2015-04-12T22:31:33Z")

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Since the early trend seems to go towards governance – would people be OK  
with an informal governance document, i.e. something that’s mutually agreed  
on and binding in that sense, but doesn’t aim at being enforceable in any  
court? I currently think that’d be my preferred option.

Otherwise we’d probably have to incorporate CSL in some way, which is  
exactly the level of bureaucracy I’d like to avoid. But if there are  
compelling arguments to go all formal, I’m certainly open to being  
convinced.

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 10:35pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/6 "2015-04-12T22:35:35Z")

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Fine with me. It can always be basis for formalization later, if needed.

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**Author:** ![Frank\_Bennett](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/frank_bennett/32/198_2.png) [@Frank\_Bennett](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Frank_Bennett)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 10:38pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/7 "2015-04-12T22:38:33Z")

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(If support is possible, it would best be done as a contribution to  
our faculty for research purposes - in principle we cannot receive  
private payments without specific approval by consent of the Faculty.  
Also, if CSL are willing to treat it as a general donation, a bit of  
extra would me most welcome.)

An informal agreement on management seems reasonable to me.

FB

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**Author:** ![Carles\_Pina](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/dbc845/32.png) [@Carles\_Pina](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Carles_Pina)\
**Post date:** [April 14, 2015, 10:27am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/8 "2015-04-14T10:27:05Z")

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Governance: keep it simple for now, fine with me!

Donation money: your break down makes sense to me. I’d say that any  
money spent on good automation tools and maintenance will pay off in  
medium term. Maybe after the first run we can have more ideas to  
improve the bot tools.

Regards,

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**Author:** ![Sebastian\_Karcher](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/sebastian_karcher/32/176_2.png) [@Sebastian\_Karcher](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sebastian_Karcher)\
**Post date:** [May 17, 2015, 9:56pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/9 "2015-05-17T21:56:14Z")

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We now have received donations from both Springer and Elsevier, and Rintze  
and I are working on announcing those publicly.

So I’d now like to finalize the budget. In addition to my original  
suggestion, I had a longer conversation in which Frank suggested that a  
significant one-time donation of $1000.- to him through the University of  
Nagoya would be very helpful. We’d help support his countless activities  
that help to improve and document CSL, including work on legal features  
that we hope to integrate into CSL as well as, most recently, his combined  
validation/testing tool he put up as part of juris-m (it’s currently in  
beta, I’ll assume he’ll make a full announcement when it’s ready, but it’ll  
be quite helpful for testing our more complex styles).

With that included, the full budget for 2015 is (see my initial e-mail in  
this thread for further details):

Donations 2015  
$10,000----

- 1,200 (d) (Sylvester for submission bot)
- 3,150 (Rintze, Sebastian, 1,575 each)
- 400 (d?) (Phillip)
- 1000 (d?) (Frank)
- 165 (d) (style manuals)
- 396 (“deficit” 2014)
- 2460 (est. taxes 2015) (10,000-anything I can tax deduct)\*.285

* * *

2015 Budgeted “surplus”: $1,229

(d denotes tax deductible for me).

I think having some leftover funding is great, e.g. if we have additional  
things we’d like to purchase or tools we’d like to fund. We’re also not  
tied to any budget cycles, so there’s no issue with carrying over funds  
into next year.

Any objections? Questions? Additional requests or ideas for funding?

(as a reminder – we have, as by last Sunday, adopted our governance  
document, currently at  
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NAqO2OfjaUZg2iEi4KvFkUiVcpcGCJVw9KnrBbBDYxk/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NAqO2OfjaUZg2iEi4KvFkUiVcpcGCJVw9KnrBbBDYxk/edit?usp=sharing).  
Rintze is putting it on [citationstyles.org](http://citationstyles.org) right now. The default  
decision-making process is still consensus on this mailing list, so this  
shouldn’t really change much.)

Have a great week,  
Sebastian

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**Author:** ![Robert\_Knight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ba9def/32.png) [@Robert\_Knight](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Robert_Knight)\
**Post date:** [May 18, 2015, 9:54am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/use-of-sponsorship-money-and-governance/1258/10 "2015-05-18T09:54:20Z")

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Budget looks very reasonable to me, agree that supporting Frank is a good  
use of funds. I had a question about the licensing of software on the CSL  
draft document.