The concept of allocating funds to Chapters was something that I help to implement a while back and the key concept of it was to allocate a certain % of OWASP membership funds to chapters (or projects) from either a local company 5k corporate membership or a locally executed profitable conference.
The objective was to empower the leaders to spent the funds available to OWASP since 'in principle' they owned it..
I'm not sure how much funds have been spent over the last couple years, but I don't think that it is a lot, specially if we don't count the amounts used by the last Summit
In fact, the 160k USD currently available, shows that the model is not working as well as it should, i.e. OWASP leaders are not spending (i.e. investing) the money make available to them!
I think there are two reasons for it:
I think there are two reasons for it:
- spending money in an organization like OWASP is not easy
- there is an idea that 'money should be kept' in the bank since it is not wise to spend it all (i.e. be fiscally conservative)
The problem here is that the amount of missed opportunities caused by the non-spending on these funds ie enormous, but because that is very hard to measure (how do you quantify missed opportunities?), it is hard to visualize the solutions and ideas we have not executed on.
I think that one way to help the chapters to spend the $ allocated to them is for them to 'invest' in OWASP Projects under a program like the one I present at OWASP Project Reboot 2012 - Here is a better model
I think that one way to help the chapters to spend the $ allocated to them is for them to 'invest' in OWASP Projects under a program like the one I present at OWASP Project Reboot 2012 - Here is a better model
