Because many of you don’t know how the management team of H4ck3rZ is thinking and how things technically work inside CAT, I’ll try to explain the mechanics of our work.
Funding is the main problem of voluntary work, because we spend a lot of money on services provided to people, marketing those services and even web-enabled services cost money because of hosting and bandwidth. CAT main funding source is the CAT Scope, which is the main event for CAT and sponsors usually take care of funding and CAT get a small amount of money after each scope that help CAT arrange the next Scope successfully, also part of the benefits CAT get out of the sponsors in Scope are the free hours in the sponsors’ labs and those hours are divided equally on foundations (such as, H4ck3rZ).
Each foundation has its isolated financial department and resources, thus, we are on our own (almost) and we have to find sources for funding. The trade-off here is that if you want to get more money, do more propaganda events and get sponsors to talk about their offers and some technical sessions that would eventually lead to business profit, this already happen in CAT Scope and webelieve that this is more that enough for CAT, we need to have more technical oriented events that has “Real” value for the audience. So, we decided to maximize the educational value of our events by preventing marketing/business campaigns from 3rd party sponsors.
This means that we are not going to do like others, we are not going to have events/conferences that has no “Real” value other than propaganda and some silly sessions about how to install something, we are H4ck3rZ, we are highly technical foundation that take the educational level to itsextreme, our goal is to turn engineering students into enterprise-international market level and this won’t happen easily and won’t happen by propaganda events.
So, H4ck3rZ has opened the door for donations from everybody with no return, this means that enterprises and companies are not allowed to donate in return of putting their logo on our marketing posters, if you want to donate then you want to do that for the sake of “Allah” (لوجه الله). Some might find it silly that we are asking for donations, but we believe that this foundation is made for the community and by the community and it won’t continue if the community is not helping in doing so. In many cases we (management) spenda lot of money from our personal financial resources to fund events and those events became ‘De facto standard’ later on, like H4ck3rZ Day, weheard later PixiCat Day and depiak, so we unleashed a set of events by inventing such event first.
if you want to donate, please contact donate@cat-hackers.net and we will contact you back to see how we can receive your donations.