What donations do we accept and what do we do with those we decide to reject?

First thanks for putting this together V, a more detailed understanding of the potential consequences is always a valuable thing.
First of all I think there needs to be a divide in the thinking between Giveth DAO funds and Giveth DAC funds. For the first we should be very careful about accepting elicit funds due to the reputation of the organization and the people involved. But for the later I wouldn't worry about this as much since Giveth DAC is a non legal entity and never will be. I mean, it's not like some government agency is going to back track all our donations once they impose regulation and check every single one.
For safety sake I think that having a separate acct where we let's funds hibernate for a certain period of time could be a good idea though, if it's possible we could whitelist certain donor accounts to go directly into that address, then if news breaks in a period of time we could try to funnel the funds back to the community that was effected. I would say that we should never pay ourselves with those funds though just as a precaution, that way non of us are individually liable for malicious action. Just my thoughts, I tend to agree with full transparency about this stuff though. We don't want to start hiding conversations just because they discuss potentially sensitive information.

We are however not a DAO or a corporation and never will be, there is only the Giveth DAC. Personal liability can be checked though indeed. But we are a DAC exactly for this reason, we are just people being united around a cause we believe in. No law against that, and if there is, well, I will never abide by it :)

Yeah this is very comprehensive.

Thoughts:

If Giveth receives funds that are stolen, we should return the funds to the people they were stolen from.... thats an easy one. So if The DAO hacker gave us ETC, (it would be stuck forever cause we don't have the ability to accept ETC... but for the exercise) we could send it to the WHG withdraw contract and everyone could withdraw it. If it was from some other hacker, we could make a new withdraw contract... and i'm sure we would, it would be fun!

If Giveth receives funds from from a terrorist organization.... What do we do? What do other charities do? What about money laundering?

My research came to the conclusion its actually not a "legal" worry for us as the DAC. The worry about receiving donations from terrorist organizations or for money laundering, is only a worry if there is a misuse of funds. These problems come from lack of accountability and transparency on how those funds are spent... where some money is funneled thru the charity to questionable places... We need to worry about the DApp being used for these things, and we had discussed this long ago, we control the UI so we can censor questionable organizations from our website, but this is a different conversation.

Anon donations... IMO ain't nothing wrong with that.

Blockchain Raffles, Pyramid Schemes, Questionable ICOs, donations from known parties that will hurt Giveth's reputation. I think writing a policy around this would be a useful exercise. And i think its important that this is the main question that needs to be answered, the secondary question is what do we do with the funds received... Giving them back to the people we don't like isn't the right answer either.

The attached document is a great piece of research.

Very interesting question! I started with sorting out the different areas for myself and reshuffled Vojtěch's list into a decision tree logic.

Unknown origin
Unconditional donation

Known origin
legally and ethically sound origin
Unconditional donation
Grant/prize/award
Passive promotion
Active promotion/participation
Controversial, questionable or unethical origin
Unconditional donation
Grant/prize/award
Passive promotion
Active promotion/participation
Illegal origin
Unconditional donation
Passive promotion
Active promotion/participation

I think we should encourage donors to identify themselves, as we want to build a platform for communities and a broader Giveth eco-system with a diverse and active membership. In my view this can be achieved on a sustainable basis only if people are transparent with their identities.

Although in general I share Griffs opinion that there is nothing wrong with anonymous contributions as such. Although I think we should think of "disincentives" for anonymous donations, e.g. "cooling pond", or white listing, or reputation scoring (low for anonymous participation, not quite sure if this is a good idea?), ...

We should actively look for, encourage and cherish donations from legally and ethically sound origin. That should be part of active community management to encourage such transparent and positive contribution.

Obviously the challenge is to separate the controversial and unethical. In the field of development finance the European institutions have agreed on the European Development Finance Institution (EDFI) exclusion list for projects co-financed by them:

https://www.deginvest.de/DEG-Englische-Dokumente/About-DEG/Our-Mandate/EDFI_DEG_Exclusion-List_en.pdf

Does not fit entirely to this challenge but might be another starting point.

Lastly illegal. Relatively easy at first sight, as in my view known illegal, that's really a problem. Even if used for a good purpose, as it is illegal it most probably created harm to other people. We would even encourage illegal activity, or "Robin Hood"-type of things. We should be very cautious in this field. At second sight there will be some "between black and white" scenarios. Illegal under which jurisdiction? - for instance.

Definitely a very interesting and necessary discussion. Coming from an international US based non profit this is an issue that we deal with quite often where I work and is of course a very important issue for the US/UK governments and EU.

I do not know enough about how Giveth is viewed as an entity legally or anything like that so can't provide full guidance here (also am not a lawyer) but can confirm that these governments will not and cannot work with Giveth if money is being transferred from or to organizations on a variety of lists (terrorism mostly). I understand that by nature the DApp is designed to be a decentralized platform so to say they cannot use the DApp because of how others are using it is a little bit silly but it will be a bureaucrat somewhere that decides how Giveth and the DApp are viewed by these parties, we can only influence that decision.

Even beyond government the far more relevant implication is for the change makers. Large scale institutional change makers (Oxfam, IRC, Save the Children, MSF etc...) will not use the DApp if a large government donor tells them they cannot. Maybe this too is okay but I see a really wide range of possibilities for Giveth and the DApp in the future and it would be a shame to limit the scope because of donations accepted in the early days.

If it would help, I can try to gather more information from our legal and compliance department on US, UK and EU regulations and what lists to be aware of so that we can at least confirm we are exercising due diligence and meeting anti-terrorism compliance requirements.

I wrote this very quickly to get it in before meeting. I will clarify later
I think we need to consider the motive behind donations that are sent directly to Giveth and consider this this is not just about money/ETH; its about our brand and protecting our values. If someone is using such donations as marketing for their own brand, we should be able to decide whether or not we would like Giveth to be associated. If we question any contributors we could ask if they are willing to donate anonymously; and if not, that should tell us that they are trying to use Giveth to promote themselves.....

You can never stop anyone using us to promote themselves unfortunately (or luckily, depends on yr view point): we are fully open-source (=permissionless). Our values are fully protected, as we, the Giveth Unicorns adhere to them. So people with the same values will flock to us, and these people, mostly will be our Givers.

1) FEEDBACK ON BRANDING and FUNDING:
We are building a Free Decentralized and Permissionless World. I couldn't care less about where the money comes from, so I most definitely would NOT send donations back once we receive them, ever.

If they contact us before and ask for permission (to donate or to use our brand) we ofc say no. But we are open-source, they can do whatever they want with our code, our brand, that's what open-source is about. We cannot stop them, but they can't stop us either.

If you guys are afraid that suddenly more mafia dudes and drug lords will feel like giving us all our money than you have not met enough crooks just yet in life (joking but not really). Abusers and scammers are gonna scam and abuse, it's up to us to ignore them (or just troll back, like I did here -- https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/8kjalp/2nd_largest_givethio_donor_comes_from_halo_3da/dz9acbq/ ). Don't worry too much about our 'brand' to be honest, if we don't give them credit, we're okay, we have our values, and we don't depend on them. Givers are NOT shareholders! If they don't like what we do with their money (=pure good), they can take it back. And that's fine with us.

Fully agree with all that Vitalik posted in this thread (thx so much for this link kay https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/999890088032006144), will copy the most important parts for the non-clickers:
- "Honestly I don't give a crap how moral charity donors are. I care about how many millions of dollars are being put toward global poverty reduction, life extension research and x-risk research. And I will fight hard against ideologies that reduce this number."
- "Decentralization does not mean not having preferences about how others act. Everyone has those (don't you wish everyone would murder and cheat less?). Decentralization is a choice of preferred means to achieve our preferred ends."
- "And charity is decentralized; that's precisely the reason I think it's an important tool for plugging holes in public goods funding."

Disagree. I find this very narrow and naive in the way it is viewed. " I couldn't care less about where the money comes from, so I most definitely would NOT send donations back once we receive them, ever" The fact that YOU could care less about where the money comes from, shows how short sighted and excluding this comment is.

Hey grace, why is it excluding? Because I express my opinion in a poll where our personal opinion is requested? 🙂 That does not mean that I am imposing it on others or that I am not open to other thoughts, does it? And as you can see I split up liability and branding in my reply. Two very different things. I don't mind being called naive though, at all. I understand why people sometimes think I am and that's perfectly ok ☺️