[Wikipedia-l] Kuro5hin becomes non profit

Joao Mário Miranda jmiranda at explicacoes.com
Fri Jun 21 22:39:36 UTC 2002


It Takes a Village to Save a Site 
By Paul Boutin   
   

2:00 a.m. June 21, 2002 PDT 
Begging for funds to keep your bankrupt site afloat rarely works. Unless
you're Rusty Foster, whose tech community site Kuro5hin just raised
$35,000 -- and a few eyebrows -- in less than a week. 

"I gotta say, I'm quite impressed at what they've pulled off," said
Slashdot.org founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. 

Slashdot's site, along with its free source code, inspired Foster to
found Kuro5hin in December 1999 as a similar forum for "technology and
culture from the trenches." 

But a string of disappointing ad models led Foster to post a long
missive on Monday titled "We're Broke: The Economics of a Web
Community." Enumerating his income and expenses, Foster asked readers to
help him meet the site's $70,000 annual operating budget. 

"This has been coming for a while. We didn't have any money coming in,"
Foster said by phone from Peaks Island, Maine, where he and his wife
relocated from San Francisco last year. 

"I spent a lot of time asking myself: Are we a magazine, are we a media
company?" Foster said. "We're a community; that's why the whole
advertising thing doesn't work for us. Advertising works in media
because the company showing you advertising is providing you value by
writing the articles. On a site like mine, the transaction breaks down
because the visitors are writing the articles themselves." 

Such introspection and analysis are standard fare on Kuro5hin, whose
tech-savvy members discuss everything from software license details to
the U.S. government's failure points in design, specification, and
implementation. There are few places you can have an intelligent
discussion like that. 

"Rusty doesn't interfere with the way the site evolves," said Robin
Bandy, one of Kuro5hin's most prolific participants who contributes
under the name "Arkady." 

But Foster's announcement shook up members, who realized their reluctant
leader might have to give up the site for a paying job. 

"Kuro5hin is about Rusty Foster the same way Slashdot is about Rob
Malda," said writer Doc Searls, an early booster of the site. "He's a
wise young man in the literal sense of the word. He's a programmer, but
from a different variety -- more intellectual, and less focused on
technology." 

"I asked the community what I should do, because that's always worked
before," Foster said. 

Bandy agreed, "Rusty honestly wants the site to be a community. A year
ago he tried to give the site over to the readers. The overwhelming
reaction was, 'Nah, you're doing a good job, keep it up.'" 

This time, though, Foster's financial bind helped him find a way to
bring others on board without selling the site. "We're talking to
accountants and lawyers," he said about converting his one-man company
to not-for-profit status under Section 501c of the Federal Internal
Revenue Code. 

Besides the tax breaks, 501c status would enable Foster to bring in
other Kuro5hin members as trustees to oversee the site. 

There should be no lack of volunteers: Foster said the largest donation
received by mid-Wednesday was $240, as the turnout came from hundreds of
small donors rather than a single sugar daddy. 

Leslie Nakajima, a vice president at PR agency Bite Communications in
San Francisco, explained the pledge drive's surprise success as proof
that, unlike many sites, Kuro5hin's worth is apparent to its fans. "They
have an obvious value proposition," she said. 

Less so for the site's name. "'Corrosion.' It's a pun on my name,"
Foster said. "Rusty ... corrosion ... get it? Don't worry, nobody else
ever got it, either."



More information about the Wikipedia-l mailing list