Dear Neos Team,
as you know, we recently had to defend the Neos trademark. I took over the coordination and communication, and it was a bit of a hard time for me. I am very thankful for your encouragement and shoulder padding, which in a way, gave at least some meaning to this whole hassle.
Budget for past work
Working for the Neos Foundation Board is part of my Open Source time, the time every active Neos Team member is donating to the project. This incident felt a bit different though, not actually like the type of contribution you’d like to work on during your spare time. And the time went on top of the actual contribution time budget I used for other parts of Neos.
Therefore I’d like to ask you, if I can invoice the time I spent during the intensive phase of this trademark battle. In total we are talking about 16 hours which are worth mentioning. Certainly, there are more hours I spent on this, but nothing I really noticed or which were as painful 
Based on an hourly rate of 100 €, that would be 1.600 €.
Budget for future work
Now that we have the trademark in place, we need to define rules how the community may use it for their purposes. For that we need a trademark policy.
There are examples by other projects (for example by Drupal and Worpress) which we can use for inspiration. In the end though, we need to create our own policy and check them with a lawyer.
Furthermore, there are more actions to take for our trademark, to make it more safe internationally. For that we’ll also need some consultancy by a lawyer and put in some additional work on our own.
For this future work and lawyer costs I’d like to reserve some budget as well. I’m not sure how much is needed, but something like 2.400 € would be reasonable. In any case, this budget would of course be only invoiced based on actual usage.
Before we vote on this, I’d like to give you the chance to ask questions. Please do so until this Friday (23th of November).
harvest_time_report_from2018-01-01to2018-12-31.pdf (29.7 KB)
