[Ground-station] Organizational Update (non-technical)

[Michelle Thompson]

Organizational Update (non-technical):

OK I have a meeting with non-profit specialists coming up in 2 hours to
figure out 1) how to work with TekTerrain (Tim Cash and @Samudra N3RDX).
This will be a policy and framework that can be extended to other
for-profit companies. What we want to avoid is anything that gets us or
them into trouble, and we definitely want to maximize the potential good.
We definitely want to avoid the “Just sign an NDA and keep things secret”
path.
and

2) how to deal with the unusual funding situation that we have. For those
that don’t know, open source amateur radio has one dominant fund (ARDC). It
is so many orders of magnitude larger than any public funding any of us
could ever hope to get that it is out of scope of current IRS regulations.
This is a problem for long-term survival of ORI. I am determined to solve
it.

501(c)(3)s have public funding requirements, along with independence
requirements. If we don’t figure this out, or increase our other funding
from the public amateur radio community to where ARDC grants are 33% or
less of our revenue, then we will probably not be allowed to exist as a
public charity past year 6 by the IRS. We have ended fiscal year 2 and are
halfway through year 3.
All of what we find will be given to ARDC. They may choose to continue to
give grants. Or, they may make some changes that will help recipients. From
early talks with the non-profit consultant, is that ARDC could stop giving
grants and start funding service programs, where they fund services done by
501(c)(3)s like us.

Another possibility is asking the IRS to exempt ARDC grants because the
funding comes from a public or community asset (the sale of the internet
addresses). Both of these things would help not just us, but all grant
recipients. This would require doing similar things that we did with
ITAR/EAR - approaching a regulatory body about a particular subject that
they may have no particular interest in agreeing with us about, and finding
a way forward.

These are some of the things that we’re going to thoroughly explore with
the non-profit consultants.

Unilaterally, we could 1) stop taking any ARDC money and declare all
previous ARDC revenue under the “unusual grant” exemption. 2) Continue with
what we’re doing, with sponsoring projects and applying for grants, and
work until the IRS says we must convert to a Private Foundation and then
just convert and deal with all the painful paperwork. or 3) Continue
working hard until it’s a problem and then close.

For the record, I am not in favor of any of these, but they are thing we
can do.

Questions? Comments? Please let me know. We have a wonderful community with
many extremely bright and motivated people. Having a super-healthy
organization that can help all those wonderful projects out there, for many
years to come, is an achievable goal, if we master the regulatory landscape
that we find ourselves in. While it's not exactly the same as the FCC,
there are some parallels here.

I’ll summarize what happens in today’s meeting as soon as possible.

-Michelle W5NYV
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