response 6 of 16:

Feb 23 21:00 UTC 2013

Sorry Dan - I scribbled the response that you're responding to since I
didn't particularly care for it myself.  :-)

Anyway - problem I was trying to address was that of
distinguishing between "customers" and "members" (in the
governance-participating sense). Dan's right that we sort of do that
already with the Paypal thing. But I was wondering if it would be
possible to turn the customer base (I probably shouldn't refer to them
as "members") into some sort of significant income stream. (We have
money now, but not necessarily forever.) Obviously these
ideas aren't fully baked, and there's the issue of reconciling that with
Grex's charitable mission.

Something to keep in mind in any discussion of the membership model is
that Cyberspace Inc. is a Michigan corporation and as such has
record-keeping and reportage obligations regarding members, such that we
probably don't want to incur those obligations for everybody anywhere in
the world who sends in a few bucks via Paypal, even temporarily, much
less in perpetuity. (Rane can probably clarify whether what I'm saying
here makes any sense.)

In any case, the issue I'm trying to address here is minor compared to
the truly difficult ones.