[Noisebridge-discuss] Noisebridge: Death and Taxes

Danny O'Brien danny at spesh.com
Wed Dec 22 19:34:30 UTC 2010


Okay, this is fun! I now have l33t haxx0r access to the membership spreadsheet!

Channelling Julian A., I will now cut and paste their email addresses
into this mailing list. THE WORLD MUST KNOW

No, actually, what I deduce from this spreadsheet is that despite lots
of scary potential horrors, our main problem seems to be largely that
PayPal is flaky, subs didn't go in, and we didn't catch it. I may be
wrong and we need to start staging coups or rounding up hippies or
writing special software that makes us cleverer or something, but that
seems to be the main problem.  This is totally a big problem in
non-profits btw, ORG in Britain, my second equal favourite non-profit
has the same annoying problems. We've essentially fixed that
organizational problem that led to this by noticing and FREAKING OUT
JUST IN TIME.

Oh I just read Andi's note and he said all of this stuff but better.
DAMN YOU FOR YOUR TENACITY

I'm sure there were other great suggestions at the meeting yesterday,
but my main one would be to relax the rules for membership or suggest
that one of the conditions for membership is to start paying the money
FIRST, before the membership acceptance.

Alright, let's get mailing!

MY FIRST TEMPLATE LETTER, SENT TO TWO PEOPLE THAT I ALREADY KNOW AND
ARE AWESOME:

Hi, I'm Danny O'Brien, famous celebrity and Internet  bon vivant. You
may know me from my roles in the Internet's "It's For The Lulz III",
and "HTTP: 503 Service Unavailable!"

I'm writing to you personally,
$FIRST_NAME, and $YOUR_SPOUSE_OTHER_FIRST_NAME because I know that you
two both jumped through insane amounts of loops to become a
NOISEBRIDGE member in the past, and that means you *care* about poor
orphan hackers in the Mission district. Perhaps a little too much. But
not in a creepy way.

Wait, this isn't going so well. I'll start again.

Turns out this Summer PayPal lovingly cancelled a bunch of recurring
subscriptions to Noisebridge, and we got a bit flakey (who knew!)
about chasing down regular subscribers*. As a consequence, the Bay
Area's third equal bestest hackerspace is in financial trouble. If we
don't catch up on the payments and refill our coffers to the tune of
$5K or so in the next month, and $15K in the next few months,
Noisebridge will be shut down, thrown out onto the streets, kaput, END
OF LINE.

This means that you will no longer have a steampunk
gentleman/gentleladyhackers club, and San Francisco will be home to
roaming packs of homeless, but self-replicating, fabrication devices
with a grudge. I don't think I have to spell out the risks there, Mr
Cyberpunk, do I?

You can make this go away by either
* GIVING US ALL YOUR MONEY, PLZ K THX
* Paying up the dues that you may have accidentally not paid thanks to
robot error,.
* Making an awesome one off donation to help us out of this hole.
* Starting up your $80 monthly donation again (Noisebridge may still vanish)
* Or just tell me why you're not paying, so I can make up good excuses
for my next mailing.

We've been so scatty that you might even have been paying us and we
didn't notice (though this only happens if you don't use PayPal). Mail
me about this too, and I'll not send you more email/send you funnier
jokes as you wish.

Here's how to do pay us:
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Donate

Please pay. Apart from supporting an awesome hacking resource in San
Francisco, you'll also ensure I have somewhere to sleep.

Best wishes,

The Internet's Danny O'Brien
+1 [MY PHONE NUMBER]  if you want to call and ask me about this, or for sexy
talk (calls cost $5000 per minute)

* (We may also have blown some of the petty cash on quaaludes and
kombucha too, but that's water under the bridge, we did it by
consensus, and no-one can prove nothing. NOTHING WE SAY)


On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 1:41 AM, Andy Isaacson <adi at hexapodia.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 08:25:20AM -0800, Danny O'Brien wrote:
>> I'm still on for gently hassling members. Somebody point me at a
>> spreadsheet or send me a list of emails or home addresses and set me
>> at them. I can be very persuasive!
>
> Done.  (I didn't realize I could do that.)
>
> -andy
>
>



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