But isn’t point 1 & 2 opposite opinions from a developers perspective ?

Obvious suggestions: Cap the amount of individual donations, and show those in summary (total amount, average per donor). Any larger donations would have to be from a named source.

Salaries… These are known to all for people who work for the UK government, in the sense that somebody is on a known pay grade, although you don’t know where within the range they are. You could do something similar – i.e. we spend so many dollars on so many software engineers, in salary ranges X-Y etc.

Or go for radical openness. Consider Mozilla. For key officers there is a lot of salary detail buried in Form 990 http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mozilla-2006-financial-faq.html, including Mitchel Baker’s $500,000 a year http://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/financials-be-damned/

Perhaps people just won’t mind.

Also, what Francis mentioned about total financial transparency is something that we have always wanted to do (not that we have any money yet, but heh, we’re getting there). A couple of things that come to mind – would you disallow anonymous donations completely or would you allow it under the condition that the organisation is ignorant of the donor as well?

Also, the charity’s staff would have their salaries known to all. How are people going to feel about this?

So, that means yes 1) all software you make is open source, but also 2) all your financial dealings are public (RSS feeds of bank statements, where are they!), 3) voluntarily obey your local Freedom of Information law (unless it is crap, in which case obey a better one).

Put those three in your articles of association – they collectively stop you ever selling out, but they also act as an excellent demonstration to Governments of three principles that they should be following.

At mySociety we do 1) (https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysociety), we’ve had a go at 2) (http://www.ukcod.org.uk/Finances) but don’t do it as well and as automatically as we could. And 3) feels terrifying; just thinking about it makes you realise exactly how impressive it is that public authorities do it.