Marlene Engelhorn hadn’t given much thought to the wealth that surrounded her as she grew up. She always considered the fortune, inherited from Friedrich Engelhorn, the 19th-century founder of the German chemical giant BASF, to be her family’s money rather than hers.
Looks like a really interesting project, I hope someone is documenting it to make a documentary or something. The debates are going to be fascinating and honestly there’s so much room for drama and division I bet things get either emotionally heated or political
Personally I can’t imagine having money to put into something and not having a dozen things I’m passionate about and want to work on. I’d probably invest most in creating an open source citizen science and consumer testing project, employ people to create 3rd party documentation of floss projects as well as data gathering and tool creation for use by open source projects.
I might use it as establishing grants to other groups, like all the passionate people I see doing things being able to say ‘I can buy you everything you need to set up properly, pay for you to study the area you’re invested in and try to help demo and advertise the solutions you’re creating… all I need is you to work on this simple but important community project’
That way they do one thing which improves the floss ecosystem directly and are set up to continue on a whole new level than before. It’d be things that are fairly simple and tailored to their abilities; researching and creating lists, 3d modeling, coding… designing tools that are useful to the central project that others can use and extend. Basically creating resources that allow others to create.
when a company makes a washing machine they start with all sorts of testing and experiments to determine how good the existing options are and to discover the best ways of determining if what they’re doing actually works. I’d create an open source platform that makes it easy for people to add knowledge and meaningful data about product design considerations so that anyone designing something has a good starting point and a platform to gather data if there’s none already.
Heh little off topic but it illustrates my point, I wonder if the lack of passion for what to do with the money comes from being born rich and just taking money for granted.