ScienceOnline, from mango tree to tax exempt

Nov 2, 2012

Earlier this week, Karyn Traphagen went to the ScienceOnline post office box, and found a letter from the Internal Revenue Service alerting us to the approval of our application for our organization to be a tax-exempt public charity.

Karyn’s excitement in sharing the news with me, and then the world, brilliantly capped ten years of building on the idea that people online would want to gather offline to deepen their conversations and strengthen their connections.

“For me, a dream come true,” I tweeted. I’m really proud of what we’ve built, and eager to see our nonprofit organization succeed in serving and sustaining the global ScienceOnline community.

Start slow, start small, Johnny Bruce told me 15 years ago under a towering mango tree. (Read this post to the end to get the story.) While the logo for ScienceOnline is an atom, and our mascot is an octopus, the kernel will always be the notion that little ideas can grow into something glorious, indeed.

Anton Zuiker ☄