Once you start collecting memberships don't you effectively become a commercial organisation?
Is the mission statement alone worth the 500k Euro / year?
I think this doesn't become a viable concept until there is a significant membership, however I feel you're going to struggle getting an anuual fee from early adopters until you hit the critical mass.
Waiving the fee for PHP.net accounts is a good start but I think to make this workable you really need to think of how to attract the influential early adopters.
It would still be a non profit organization of course. Again, we are not talking about 500k Euro / year at all. We are talking about maybe 30k Euro / year at the start and then slowly growing to above 100k Euro.
I do agree however that a lot of what I see emPHPower to be about requires that it does grow beyond 10k in members. I have had some preliminary chats with some key people in the PHP.net development community as well as some that are more active on community related activities and so far it seemed like there was enough common ground to get some buy in.
The same applied to people at some potential sponsors I spoke to. For this to work out we of course need everyone to start pooling around this organization (developers, end users, corporations, press). I am hoping that doing some smaller efforts like the TestFest will help proof that its possible to bring the different parties together to push the common goal forward (in this case bringing developers and end users together to improve the quality of PHP). As such I also believe that I have attained a certain level of credibility with my efforts around PHP release management, that I at least get the benefit of the doubt with most of my ideas.
I think this could be a great idea, there are so many areas that such an organization could address, it will be interesting to see what ideas the community has about it.
By the way I corrected my oversight on the Weekly Reader. :)
Doug
The PHP Advocacy Group. or The Professional PHP Advocacy Group.
Thats my vote for a name. I like throwing professional in there, its used far too little in connection with PHP.
I think emPHPower sounds just wrong, but The PHP Foundation would sound really really solid or even The PHP Software Foundation would be quite good.
