[Foundation-l] Re: Thoughts about a future board budget meeting (or budget board meeting ?)

Wed May 11 12:18:10 UTC 2005

--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think the board should do a budget/financial meeting soon. The last one was
> done a trimester ago, so it is high time.

Yep it is. 

> It seems to me we probably largely differed from our first trimester budget
> planning (but I may be wrong :-)). If so, I presume it will be due to the
> various hosting offers we got... In any cases, I think it would be most
> informative to see where we are going...

I was planning on just asking the board to extend last quarter’s budget to also
cover this quarter, since that is what actually is happening. I had hoped that
we would *finally* be able to buy much more than we needed and thus get ahead
of traffic increases but that did not seem to happen. A supplemental budget
could be added along with a supplemental fund drive if needed.  

> Mav
> I have been wondering in the past few days if you could provide us an update
> on our financial situation ? Both general report (quick update on values) and
> later one of your nice quaterly report on the foundation website would be
> most welcome... I suppose you will answer me that you did not receive banking
> statements yet to do so... but I guess Terry could help there more than he
> could before.

You suppose right. :) The problem has been on my end (my fax machine was not
working). As of this week it should be working now, so I’ll remind Terry about
that. 

> Question for developers :
> I'd like us to be informed on a non technical level of the future technical
> requirements to expect and possibly to be reminded how much we can expect
> from partners on this. Ie, how much is planned in the future to spend on
> servers, hosting and so on. I am sure you will answer it is tough to say, I
> know :-)

Yes - this is very, very much needed. I asked for a needs/wants/wish list for
the last budget but that never materialized. Thus we brought in a whole bunch
of money with no concrete plan on how to spend it. That is not something I want
to repeat. 

> The general idea would be to try to evaluate how long the money we have in
> the bank will last... and if we can envision spending some of it on more
> creative ways than servers :-)
> Opinion on this topic ?

We need some numbers on that first. 

> PS : I must mention that we are currently stuck in a rather ridiculous
> situation. The french squids needs some RAM... this RAM can only be purchased
> in a few websites... which refuse american credit cards... so we are
> currently trying to have it bought by the german association... which legally
> is not really authorized to do this... so, either the french association
> quickly has cash to pay for such expenses, or the foundation should have a
> credit card in europe to take care of such matters... opinion ?

We could wire some money to the French chapter’s bank account. 

-- mav

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