Posted by kevinwalsh on May 3, 2010 at 8:45pm
I realize 99% of you reading this are not lawyers, so with that in mind:
How have organizers of medium-to-large sized drupalcamps dealt with legal liability? In Toronto, one of our options is to incorporate as a non-profit. It's quite a bit of hassle, but it would allow us to accept checks from sponsors made out to DrupalCamp TO and could greatly reduce risk.
Any thoughts?
Comments
I think the Florida camp
I think the Florida camp partnered with an existing non-profit to handle donations. That way you don't have to go through all the paperwork yourself, and they probably already have all the invoicing/tracking systems in place.
V. large hassle.
I think the proper people to weigh in on this are the Drupal Camp LA folks and the Bay Area Drupal folks, but Portland thought about this last year.
We didn't end up having time to put together a 501(c)(3) or anything like that. It is a tremendous hassle, and I can't imagine that Canada would be easier.
Finding a non-profit to partner with as a 'supporting sponsor' to be able to take donations is a big help. To get away from the 'we need a lot of cash', we brand ours as a 'free community event', and we get a lot of stuff for free.
Expense related tip: Insurance was, in past years for Portland, a big budget hit. So last year I asked my insurance agent if my own business policy would cover it. And sure enough, it did.
He faxed over something to the venue, and it saved us not a small amount of money.
Hey Kevin - I'm in Vancouver
Hey Kevin -
I'm in Vancouver and was one of the core organizers for our last Camp (in '08). We ran a lot of the money and whatnot through one of the sponsor companies, and the venues' insurance covered us in that respect, but I still ended up putting venue deposits on my credit card gasp, which obviously wasn't ideal.
What we've loosely discussed, but not really taken any proper steps towards, is having the local PHP Users Group register as a non-profit, and using them as an umbrella organization for other groups such as VANDUG, and our events and such. Who knows, we may eventually get it together on our own, as then we can open a proper bank account up in the organization's name, which would solve a lot of the money transferring issues.
In Madison
As an organizer of both Drupal Camps and BarCamps in Madison we've been pretty fortunate. We have a fiscal sponsorship agreement with a local non-profit (DANEnet) that provides a Paypal account, and accounting services we can use to manage our donations in exchange for a small fee.
For our last DrupalCamp we connected with folks at UW who were able to help provide a venue, wifi and most of the actual event infrastructure (recording sessions, registration desk helpers, etc). I think it's definitely a great way to go, if you can identify a local university using drupal. The camp provides them with a free / low cost training opportunity in exchange for venue space, which during the summer may otherwise be empty.