This introducation was kept as short as possible, Donorge is a very new donation service which is based on Drupal. (note that I (Casper) will also be present at the Drupal conference 2005 for Donorge) Also consider having a look at http://drupal.org/forum/4 to see the announcement of the ready for usage donations module
What is Donorge?
Donations are the most general way of supporting any organization and when you recognize we all have shared interests in donations, you will find the strongest points to be relations. Relations confront those who isolate. Donorge is a stand alone donation service, a free giving network developed under the GPL license on savannah.nongnu.org (at 5 - production/stable status). Donorge is very young, just about 2 months old but by now already more feature complete than the majority of other donation solutions (note that Donorge has been privately developed for over a year). Donorge is maintaining a low profile before it has tackled some it's interface and English, but Donorge in fact already is on-line and ready for usage.
Long term goal
Make people recognize that a giving network is better off organized when developed in the open. The Donorge mission: free donations, transparency, bottom-up control. To make people understand that an openly developed giving network is a priceless shared interest which cannot be afforded to ignore. “When I want to give something, I want to see before me a network which is openly dedicated to the act of giving and supporting. I want to recognize the strengths of that network in relation to my and the receiver's interests. I want to know the giving network remains neutral. A smart giving network which benefits people who want to give and receive money or goods. A shared interest dedicated to supporting each our own interests.”
Donation wishes and demands
Using Donorge should enable donors to make more strategic and efficient donations. Donors should be able to logically see from how the network is organized that their donation is safe to make and directly targeting their interest. A bottom-up controlled relational network is the basis for allowing the self growing of such a network. Both donors and receivers ought to see their needs for donations openly developed to enable the network to be as neutral, yet dedicated as possible. The requirements for reaching this are to protect the development of this shared common interest under the GPL license.
Costs
Already Donorge is affordable for anyone to adopt and use: free. Anyone who wants to receive is free to receive. Donorge will go on to adopt more payment processor methods and only mirror their cost, there are no added costs. Donorge relies on organizations or individuals to show or sponsor support. Compared to existing donation networks, feature wise Donorge is not offering anything significantly less, on most parts in fact more already. It is fair to bear in mind that Donorge has now been on-line for only about 2 months and was very low profile (and still is). Most attention has now been focused towards all base functionality and is now changing to usability.
Strengths and Advantages
“You do not relate to this and that? Then how do you explain telling me this and that? Why should I (continue to) support your organization or your interest? I do not see how your interests relate to others interests, it seems in actuality you are isolated while you tell me all kind of things. Based on that I favor to support the other organization with my donations. That other organization is transparent about it's interests and relations. In addition it shows that by supporting them I also indirectly support some other directly related interest and another, this is visibly shown to be close to my initial interests. Your organization no longer interests me, because _you isolate_. I have discovered that in reality, your mission or organization _is isolated_.” Isolating is in direct opposition to relating. In Donorge, interests relate. With open source, there is a natural strong point in showing relations. This strong point has not yet been recognized on the most common of all supportive methods: donations. Donorge means relating, not isolating. Donorge for example relates to Drupal, an organization actually present at FOSDEM in 2005. The relation is a dependency relation. Donorge thus has interests in Drupal and wants to see it supported and it works exactly like this on all levels in a relational donation network. We simply all have each our own local interests from both a donor and receiver perspective. Donorge also allows donors to make donating require less effort introduces the ability to make more strategic donations.
Next steps of action
Although the Donorge functionally already is very complete, the next steps for Donorge lie in making it more accessible. Make it simple to see what Donorge already offers and to have more organizations/software projects begin to take notice of Donorge. Donorge depends on community support for this. Donorge can use any support. You can already begin to use it yourself, you can donate to Donorge, you can offer help or you can mention others about Donorge. Donations are a shared interest, so the first step is recognizing a giving network simply is about helping each other and yourself.
