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

2) FEEDBACK ON LIABILITY
This is a separate issue. If steps need to be taken to protect you personally... (no personal worries but I do get some people have) then you should indeed follow up with a lawyer so that Unicorns are safe in the 'real world'.

Great work in putting this together Vojtech. It shows not only your own level of integrity but your genuine concern for Giveth and its affiliates.

I agree with Vojtech, Yalor, Ronald and Linzee
I profoundly disagree with Kris
I am not sure where Griff stands but he has good questions and I liked the document that was shared.

There are several points that are being viewed slightly wrong and others that make general assumptions that are not reflecting the reality of Giveth today.

My Staring point is drawn from an old document that I recycled, which disappeared from the current Giveth GD. It specifically describes the Giveth Brand and what it originally stood for:

Our brand wants to be related to projects that can scale and offer limitless possibilities to help a good cause.
Our focus is to attract purpose, facilitate funding and enable support for the cause.
Giveth invites the community to connect, get involved, create and transform.

You could argue that the current mindset thinks differently, but I still support Giveth under this “old” assumption.

The issue at hand needs to be broken down into two areas, (I think I may be voicing the same concerns as Yalor). Your issue today is receiving funds from contributors for YOU to either develop the giveth dapp, support the giveth governance or support the communication team…Is that right?
Does the community know this? Is it clear that this is going to salaries?
If you claim that what you are currently doing is saving the world, I afraid you are confused. This may be the reason why we were not considered for the Pineapple fund. Not only are we NOT a legal entity (which means we take accountability and legal responsibility for conducting ethical business) but we are not saving the world…at least NOT yet. Therefore YOU are not a charity. You are a bunch a nice, enthusiastic people working on a platform that is meant for good use (in the future). BUT you won’t have control of that either in the future, would you? No, because we are permisionedless, anyone can fundraise in the future platform for anything they want. And yes, that may include stuff you may not want to be related to… How does that feel for a great “decentralised=permissionedless” world?

Wanting to deny possible risks and damage to the project we embarked to build is irresponsible. We are responsible to make decisions with good judgement that lead to consequences beyond our own reach and visibility. This primarily includes FUNDS. There is no law against gathering around a cause you truly believe in, but there is a responsibility to manage funds in a ethical way and that is the reason that all these laws exist (AML, Anti-Terrorist, etc..) Just because it is Crypto does not mean that these laws need to be ignored, and if they are, what kind of users/contributors are we really attracting??

Facts (TODAY)
1. Giveth is not a charity
2. Giveth is not a legal entity
3. Personal liability is considered here
4. Giveth a engaging in crowdfunding to raise funds to build a dapp
5. Giveth is not a decentralised entity by any stretch
6. Giveth is not Permissionless
7. The issue you are discussing only affects funds receive by the Giveth DAC

MY OPINIONS
1. Giveth partnerships could be detrimental to build trust amongst potential donors
2. If contributors (donors) offer support without exploiting the Giveth name and Brand, those contribution and genuine and deserve to be considered. On the other hand, if the idea is to exploit the use of the name and brand to gain business benefits and entice users to buy into their product, I will not consider that a genuine act of kindness.
3. The lack of sound decision wrt donations, leads to more than not having enough funds to pay salaries for yourselves, it also leads to (from the document Institute of fund-raising) the loss of donations from other supporters, loss of volunteers and contributors.
4. Don’t Make decision based not on your own security, views and interests but the interest of the greater community you are serving and representing.
5. Establish your own limits for contributions. For example anything less than 5 ETH will not be questioned, anything above that, do an informal review of the source, anything above 20 verify source. This is just to give an example.
6. When the contributors want to establish an affiliation (use Giveth name, community, brand), Ask if the donation would still be considered is there is -No affiliation-? I think this is what Linzee brought up.
7. Prepare a list of questions for donations above a certain amount and a have a voting system in place. Involve the Giveth community in that process (that is to preserve the “decentralise nature” of this initiative.

8. Define what you consider your sustainable values, moral responsibility and ethical behaviour as this differ from person to person to make an objective decision.

QUESTIONS
Are you are receiving funds for the purpose to build the dapp?
For the purpose to support your Governance system?
For the purpose to communicate with the community?
If so,
The contributors to your crowdfunding, normally called donors should know this, thus this should remain transparent. Accountability lies on your side to ensure those funds are used in the way they were intended and you are accountable to report back to your contributors. This is part of your ethical behaviour.

Do you want to make decision because is legally required? Does this determine your behaviour?
Do you want to make decision based on moral and ethical responsibility and in alignment to your values and ethos? How the decision is relevant to Giveth purpose and how it is likely to inhibit Giveth from pursuing its purpose. (This last para was taken from Griff’s shared document Institute of Fundraising)

Personally, I rather Giveth affiliates act upon consensus driven by the latter one. If so, you need to determine what is ethical and morally viable and what is not, this will be sufficient for you to decide who can and cannot contribute to your cause. Take this as your policy to guide your decisions.

Facts (FUTURE)
1. Controlling funds in a multi-sig places liability to the multi-sig owners
2. Giveth platform may or may not be used by terrorism, traffickers or other illicit activities to laundry money. The questions is: Is Giveth holding these funds? How are these funds collected and vetted? Do the collection of these funds comply with e-money transfer regulations?. All these questions, would not exist if Giveth designs its architecture in such way that no centralisation is part of it. I.e. no multi-sig approval to release funds.
4. Any gifts that are known to be proceeds from Crimes are unlawful and will be prosecuted.
5. One illicit organisation that manages to laundry money thru the Giveth platform by donating funds and allocating it multiple campaigns, will damage the Giveth name and brand.

To close, I would like to show my appreciation to Ronald for his comments and well put message. I don’t know you (yet, and unfortunately for me) but not only do I see a genuine concern for the Giveth project, I see a sound judgement in your comments that go beyond what we see in front of us. In the end, people who want to do good things, change the world and bring positive impact will always do it with transparency and accountability (that goes specially for contributors/donors). Those are the people we want in the Giveth Community.

No doubt this is a challenge, but I get great hopes by looking at this discussion that Giveth will prevail with a sound way forward.

Hope we have the opportunity to meet somewhere in near future!
Yes, I am inspired by the work already done and the potential of Giveth to really make a difference. In my experience its not so much lack of funds that limit the success of development work. There is a lot of money out there already. The use of these funds is the challenge, a lot of this is "top-down" or "foreign expert-local beneficiary" driven, and a lot of this just misses the point. Overheads are another issue, and the business models of government organizations and NGOs creating distorting incentives. There is a huge opportunity to overcome these things through Giveth!

After running through the points made on the issue broad up by Vojtech, one idea that came to my mind was not to look to much for a concrete set of rules or policies now.
We are discussing scenarios which might come, but maybe the challenges will be different. So it might be better to look at this from a process point of view, making sure there is a process or something similar in place that creates room for maneuver or decision making for the Giveth community. Plus to think of and prepare for some options to react, e.g. implement something like a “cooling pond”. So the idea would be: Create something that enables the Giveth community to manage a situation if it comes up instead of trying to set rules and policies now for a future situation we hardly can know now in all the relevant details.

I am not sure what solutions are proposed to this topic since we did not get around to discuss this in Cardona. After some talking we came up with a solution I have not seen mentioned anywhere. The suggestion (for the case at hand) is to do it white-hat style and find out the original participants of the malicious ICO and refund to everybody an amount reflecting their part of the donation. Pro: Really cool and elegant solution that uses the possibilities of Ethereum. Con: Likely expensive in gas cost, unsure how complicated setting up the script is.