[Cerowrt-devel] on incorporating as an educational institution(s)?

[Dave Taht]

To me, "bufferbloat is solved. The tree is falling and is beginning to
crack the speed of sound.

Most of my interests have shifted back to high speed
videoconferencing, and on improving wifi,
and I enjoy teaching, working with students, and passing "the
Knowledge" along far more than life in a corporate world,
and in all honesty, I would like to semi-retire again, sail on my
boat, and play with goddaughter more than the Internet.

I just finished up an insanely difficult (but profitable) stint with
apple working on (among other things)
a new "rpm" metric for "responsiveness under normal working
conditions", for which we just established a new mailing list here -

https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/rpm

and hope to march that concept towards plentiful open source code and
benchmarks in the ietf, and here, in the coming months.

There is a lot left to do, and for a change I have enough cash in the
bank to finally try and put some (infra)structure
around our efforts to make the net better that might lead towards
sustained funding for more open source work for everyone ...

... from a multiplicity of sources like the FCC, other educational
grants, and so on.

I have dithered, for years, on forming some sort of non-profit because:

* I'm not particularly fond of living in america,
* I'm not big on just doing "bufferbloat". It's fixed, lets go do good
things on the rest of the internet!
* I hate paperwork. Signing my name is physically difficult for me now
* dislike structures and centralization in general
* I am terrible at writing for grant money
* worse at keeping track of my hours
* love working with dedicated volunteers
* being for profit LLC was simpler
* forming 501c3s was hard for a while...
* a public benefit corp seemed like the right thing for a while

and didn't know what I would do whenever I finally grew up.

we did make two efforts along the way - icei.org was a good start but
we never achieved non-profit status, and I sit on the board
of https://commonsconservancy.org/ also which tries to eliminate the
paperwork problem.

I recently hired an assistant who has been helping me cope with stuff
like this a lot better than I ever have before (thx, sasha!),
and I'm thinking strongly that the right path for me, at least, to go
would be to form a new educational institution, dedicated to
explaining
"how the internet really works", taking in students, doing research,
pushing stuff from idea to implementation, doing educational videos
and updating and republishing important textbooks, and the bridges we
build between people, that we've always done around here, but finally
with a veneer of respectability and steady funding.

I've sometimes thought that forming a "Church of Reason" was a better
approach than a 501c3! (we'd saint a dozen scientists and engineers,
use bunsen burners instead of candles, use whisky rather than wine,
and do baptisms for all ages in a hot tub. :)), but I'm pretty sure
the FCC and NSF won't fund that. Still, it's tempting, churches are
still respected in many societies....

Anyway, I'm still dithering. First problem I have is what to call the
darn thing. "the uncenter for network excellence" is at the top of my
list at the moment. A bit long, though.

Second problem, is what class of incorporation works best, I've
contacted a lawyer in the USA, but would like to establish something
in denmark, germany, or sweden - or all three! heck... india, africa
and south america also.

I'm open to other ideas!? (and participants), but would like to burn
the money on this sort of uncorporate infrastructure before I'm too
tempted to buy some expensive test gear for my new wifi lab.

-- 
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Dave Täht CTO, TekLibre, LLC