Hi
I am not usre if this has been discussed earlier, but id did not see it.

Why don't we have ads in this website?. The revenues from it could be used to provide awards, or help people go to the annual meetings, etc.
I have talked with friends who have a constant income based on this...

cheers

Rafael

It would be an interesting exercise (especially considering the amount of sticky search engine content we have in the forums) and like you I want to see funds generated going into incremental improvements to the website, OpenACS itself, OpenACS improvement grants, and/or other projects that benefit OpenACS.

I have one concern. The sticky forum content is not realy suitable for advertising purposes. As long as the forum is still full of comments about problems installing oacs "out of the box". a Google ad campaign could backfire on the toolkit. So unless we have something simple people can use without RTFM, so by point and click, like the folks over at Basecamp do, it doesn't seem logical.

Why not offer a VM based OACS lite hosted edition based on Dotfolio and feedreader. That might make an interesting candidate for new users to get a feeling, just like Philip had "Remind me and Wimpypoint" way back then. We've got plenty of web 2.0 tricks available to offer something interesting.

With this as entrypoint, on a seperate domain name, we could create an interesting ramp up for more advanced features. At least it lowers the entry barier, and takes away the heat of the background development issues. Advertising and hanging out dirty laundry are bad bedmates.

Just a thought.

Ben, serving google ads does not result in higher traffic to the forums package. So if we offer google ads with our forums installation (and I'm pretty sure someone has already done this) we should be fine.

Regarding what to do with the money is a different issue. I would love to use the money to set out bounties or offer a reverse auctioning system like rentacoder has (the one who says he will do the job for the lowest price gets the contract). We have so many places in OpenACS where work is needed but noone from the main developers has any motivation to do something about it or we will not find any client who is willing to pay the rates of core developers to do the tedious work.