How about donating to Sourceforge?  It's the spirit of free software, programming, etc.

Most of the organizations that give out computers/software to places/people that need them and can't afford them give out donated pc's and software. So unless you are going to buy a pc with the funds and donate that, it's not exactly going to be practical to do.

Big companies like Adobe donate CD's of their software in bulk...and Apple has been donating computers, almost since the beginning of the company's existance, to schools. I went to a high school that recieved one of their first donated computers. Microsoft donates copies of Office, Visual Studio, and Windows in bulk, too.

Many of these charities accept your old pc and they fix them up and pass them out...a form of recycling. They take parts form a bunch and build a Frankenstein's monster from them. Then they usually end up shipped off to Hong Kong to welfare recipients...or to Africa.

There are small poor islands that can't even afford enough internet access for schools, hospitals & libraries. That is what the whole .tk project was all about...selling domain names with the island's .tk in order to help fund internet access for the island.

I think it is quite clear that all the suggestions for donating credits has come to a head and that is Donating to charitable organizations for PC's ect,BUT Mouser has suggested and the whole point of donating credits,I'm to believe is that at some point would have to benifit Donationcoder.com Although It was I first who suggested the "wish List' which I think most would agree but getting back to Donationcoder.com as it has been pointed out that this forum does not recieve a great amount of donations and I'm pretty sure it's costly to run and do everything to keep Donationcoder.com running smoothly...SOanother  suggestion.... would be to open a pool(If not already opened) to donate credits into this pool for emergencies, such as upgrading servers Improving the site, running competitions adding to all the hard work and effort for those who contribute ect...Now that has a lot to do with Donationcoder.com...As for donating to charities why not for3 months of a year instead of drawing winners on the forum for members, donate the software to charities (Educational and Learning programs) that way Donationcoder.com gets the benifits from both sides...After all, Charity begins at home....

OFF TOPIC:
PS: A friend of mine and myself ask people for old bits and bytes and fix up old computers ect and donate them to under privilaged children in fact I've just helped donate a computer to two children aged 11 and 9 years old who where the only kids who never had a PC to do projects ect at home and  in their class room... They where promised over a year ago by someone else that they would get one, they where even given fried boards and burnt out drives and where to believe that they could use it to build a PC...I put out a plea and was promised by a few but only two people came forward and helped ...The kids dream owning a PC had finally come true and walked away with their very own...

Just an Idea: Referer Donations
If a Boardmember introduces someone to DC and this new guy joins the forum or donates to a programm, maybe the referer could get a little donation? The new guy just have to say at registration who is his / her referer...

this is an interesting idea..
it's related to an idea that javajones had about letting people from other sites use donationcoder as their system of microdonations, by letting them choose an account where a certain portion of their donation goes automatically.

for example, imagine if a site goodsite.com wanted to allow users to exchange microdonations and ask people to support their site, they might ask us to set up something where when someone donates to the system from their site, instead of 50% of donation going to us, 50% would go to goodsite.com.  or 45/5, etc.

the only thing is i dont want us to become a middleman trying to profit off of being a middleman in financial transactions.. donationcredits is not all about making money as financial middleman. we can leave the financial game to paypal and google and credit cards.  and affiliate like systems always seem iffy to me.

but, there is no reason donationcoder.com has to take 50% of new donations.. that was just a figure we started with.  it might be fun to say that 50% of each incoming donation goes somewhere.. either directly to the site account if user doesn't say anything special, or maybe if user who donates has someone specific that referred them or is their friend, they could maybe specify right away that the credits should go to them.

i guess part of the problem i have with affiliates is that you basically create this incentive system where people are hard selling other sites in order to make a profit - which i think hurts the reputations of both places.

In response to cPilot's idea about graphics, that could be a part of the same request system I'm talking about, there could be a "Graphics" category for requesting icons, logos, skins, icon sets, etc. Just another thought...

His idea also made me think about possible private requests, eg. one person or a group of people could "close" the request they made to further bids if, for instance, they want a graphic or something for themselves. Though that does kind of defeat the spirit of public software in a way, it would cater well to graphics. Maybe it should not be an option for standard utility requests or something.

Also, possibly private requests to a specific user or list of users. Maybe you really like a particular person's development "style" or something and want them to develop a piece of software, so you start a request for that dev or group of devs and people can still bid on it, but no other developers could accept the bids.

Perhaps this is a bit too complex, but maybe the basic ideas could be used and it could be expanded as time goes on. I would be more than happy to participate in the script's development, if needed, as well. I have fairly extensive PHP/MySQL experience so if there isn't a solution already available or in place, we could build one.

Ben

One thing I would like to see added to the forum is a form of "Graphics" snacks.
There are those of us who are "artistically" impaired and would like to be able to request maybe unique Icons, skins, bitmaps, jpegs etc. to use in their applications. 
Maybe provide a way to allow private graphic designs for those who want to copyright particular designs and such.

Great idea!

Maybe bidders could even have the option of a "late bid amount", like entering two bids, one by when they want it, and one for when it's late but they'll still take it.

Ben

Just tell me whom to donate to and I will do it!