Tech Art… incorporated!
The Tech-artists.org community is now legally and officially the Technical Artists Forum, Inc!
Pretty impressive, huh? We’re now a legally registered non-profit corporation.
This is important for a couple of reasons. The big one is that now the community’s assets - the website and its archive, the domain names, and all $0.89 of our finances – legally independent of any individual person. Hopefully this will keep the community flourishing for a long time to come. It also means that the if we ever get into a legal wrangle, it’s the “corporation” and not any individual admin or forum member who is liable. As international regulation of the internet gets more and more complicated, this is an important way to makes sure our volunteer admins are not taking any undue risk.
Fall fund drive
This momentous occasion is a good time to support the community by hitting our tipjar. We’ve only got about 3 months of server hosting left from our last fund drive, and we also need to get our balance up enough to start an official TAO bank account. If you get value out of this community – the technical info, the job postings, and the networking – chip in to help us keep doing what we do.
Death and Taxes
We’re in the process of applying for federal tax exempt status. Assuming that goes well, any contributions that come in will be tax-deductibe in the US. Hopefully, it will also make it easier for some of the companies who have helped us out in the past – with, for example, sponsoring the get-together after the GDC bootcamp – to support the community and help keep the lights on. However it costs about $350 to register for tax-exempt status, and our first priority is keeping the community up and running.
Get involved
As our formal structure gets going we’ll need to have more depth on our bench – more mods from more backgrounds, industries and disciplines. If you’ve got any experience in nonprofit paperwork or accounting, definitely let us know! If you’re interested in helping out in non-monetary ways, send a pm to @theodox, @Jeff_Hanna or @butters.