[Ground-station] general finances update + what to do about future travel expenses

[Michelle Thompson]

We now have nearly $14,000 in the bank for ORI operations. Much of this is
from our successful Trans-Ionospheric badge project. The rest is from
deeply appreciated individual donations.

We do not sell memberships to ORI. Membership is by participation.

I'd like to keep the operations money dedicated to engineering expenses
(parts, boards, manufacturing) and not rapidly deplete it for travel
expenses.

However, we are looking at some expensive travel autumn 2020.

Specifically, we will most likely need to do some fundraising for travel
for Tokyo Ham Fair 2020.

Tokyo is an important event. The plan is to demonstrate a functional
prototype for a tracking ground station. This is Open Rotator plus Phase 4
Ground receiver. We will be including whatever we need in order to track
and receive signals from the Lunar Gateway. We will be there at the
invitation of JAMSAT.

I expect this to be expensive travel for multiple people to go, and will
include some shipping.

Something coming up much earlier on the travel schedule is Hamcation. We
will have a series of meetings about our GEOx4 proposal. We have a booth
reserved.

We will be including a travel budget in the grant applications we are
working on. Everyone working on the applications agrees that meeting in
person makes online collaboration much more likely to succeed.

What's the problem with this? Well, we have no assurance that any grants
will be funded and we don't have a clear timeline.

Therefore, we need some creative solutions for travel fundraising.

What can we do to make participation much more economically egalitarian?
What can we do to address this?

Why am I bringing this up?

I do not expense my travel to ORI.

However, I do not expect the growing number of people that participate to
donate their travel in the same way. Expecting participants to have to pay
their own way to open source related events means that participation is
limited to those that are economically privileged. It's important to me to
get this aspect right, and that is why I am bringing it up.

If there's a policy we need to write or a foundation or fund that helps
organizations like us, or another organization that is successfully
addressing this challenge, please share your thoughts!

-Michelle W5NYV
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