[whit537]

Kinda up to you. Recruit your friends to join if you want a say. :^)

> Individuals contributing at least $1,000/year to the endowment fund qualify as OSE Members. Members advise the OSE board on strategic matters, such as the grant-making model, and appoint community-nominated board directors. These rights are legally defined in our membership policy.

https://github.com/osendowment/foundation?tab=readme-ov-file...

[psychoslave]

$1000 to join the discussion table, wow, that's an extremely high bar. What is the motivation of such an excluding entry barrier?

[kvinogradov]

We don't require a membership to participate in GitHub discussions, but it is required to be invited to closed events and to be part of the OSE governance.

The global average salary of a software engineer is $5,906/month, and the OSE membership is $83/month ($1,000/year), so it would require donating ~1.4% of gross income. This aligns fully with the 1-2% of income that an average U.S. individual donates every year, and we are targeting more senior engineers, not the average ones.

So it is affordable for our target audience, but requires some personal commitment. To be efficient in the long term, an endowment must be managed by people who have skin in the game.

It would also be irresponsible to have people who can't or don't want to personally donate $1,000 to our cause, or people outside of the tech industry, managing a multi-million-dollar community fund focused on solving a pretty niche industry problem. Otherwise, the endowment ends up being as efficient as a typical government!