OSR finances and new patreon

Hi guys,

No cool teaching to announce but rather boring tables today. I have been planing to do that for months but it seems I always prefer organizing go teaching than dealing with money.

How we deal with money

As you might know, running OSR costs money. We prefer to be as transparent as possible on this matter. Since OSR is not registered (yet) as an organization we don't have a proper bank account. OSR money is managed on my (climu) paypal account at the moment. I keep track of all expenses and income in a sheet our team can always see. I am sorry to say I canot publish this sheet because we have some specials prices with our teachers and the teachers want them to remain private.

All numbers here in € are related to the period between OSR creation (February 2017) until now (March 2018).

Expenses

OSR expenses can fit in 2 categories:

1. Hosting(109€): Our server is the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet with weekly automated backup for a cost of 5€ per month. Name domain is registered a Namecheap and costs 13€ per year. All together that's 6€ per month to run this server (see note at the end).
   
2. Teaching (261€): In one year, we set up 11 lectures with various teachers and 3 teaching games with a professional player. As explained above, we canot go into specifics here.

Incomes: New patreon

OSR income (250€)

It only came from one time donations until now. The good news is 100% of the donations were made since September 2017. If we keep this rhythm, we can expect to double this amount for next year. 

No ads?

Some team members suggested to add some ads on the website to gather more. Others prefer to rely 100% on the community in this area and we will go this way for now. We are open to discuss that with you guys.

New patreon!

Following the request of several OSR members, we have created a patreon for OSR. This will allow you to support OSR on a regular basis and us to be able to  plan our expenses in the future with more confidence.

Plans and goals

The first goal of OSR is to stay alive. That means 10€ per month. This will allow us to pay hosting cost and save some 4€ per month for future exceptional events or issues. This has already been covered by our patreon supporters as we speak.

Our next goal is to reward a monthly league winner with a teaching game from a professional go player. That would mean roughly an additional 50€ per month.

We also plan on setting up lectures as often as possible. Once we saved the 10€ for monthly cost and the above teaching game cost, all remaining funds will be put in a chip-in. Once this reaches the amount of a lecture cost we will set up a lecture and you will be able to choose the topic in a poll.

All OSR events will always be free for all to attend and we will try our very best to record it and publish it afterwards. Our goal is to provide free quality teaching for everyone.

We need strong players

While we are happy to see OSR community is growing both in number and in spirit, we think OSR lacks strong players (2d+). We think having many strong players playing in our leagues would benefit all the community. Indeed that would mean more teaching games and we would be able to enjoy some high level games and reviews on a regular basis. While Kyu players can easily learn in OSR we fear we are, at the moment, not able to offer much to the dans in the teaching area. We plan on setting up monthly professional teaching game with a league winner with the hope it will attract more strong players.

Teaching should flow down!

Indeed we are here making the choice to spend much teaching money for the few strongest players of the OSR community. For this to work we needs to have the teaching flow going down from dans, to sdk and finally to ddk.

Hence we remind all OSR members that it's important to review your league games and answer other player's questions whenever it's possible.

You are the best!

The whole OSR team is really happy and excited about what our community is building here. Allow me to address a huge thanks to everyone: the OSR community, the OSR team and our beloved teachers and all the people who donate to make this possible.

Note: You might notice that the announce 108€ server cost is higher than the expected 6x12=78. It's because I fill the server account with one time 50€ payment to prevent doing it often. It means we still have a couple of month of server already paid.