Hi SLOBs,
Conservancy staff doesn't follow our member projects mailing lists - the
proj...@sfconservancy.org are always the official communication point
between Conservancy and its member projects. As I hope you can
appreciate, we have 45 member projects (including Outreachy, which has
around 80 internships per year that we administer). This thread has come
to our attention though, and I want to clear up a few things.
* Good communication with Conservancy
We rely on SLOBs and the official Sugar representative to let us know
when you approve some action and need us to do something. For example,
no one notified us of the election results earlier in this year. In
researching the issues that came up today, we discovered that the
election happened, and we will update our records under the Fiscal
Sponsorship Agreement (and the sugar@ alias) accordingly. We don't
object to hiring someone to communicate with us or to rely on
volunteers. If you do hire someone, we will rely on volunteers to let us
know that the paid representative should be paid and that we can rely on
their instructions (and then again if you decide not to have that person
work for you anymore). We expect to communicate directly with the sugar@
alias and we cannot be expected to closely read mailing lists dedicated
to other matters in case there is something mentioned that is relevant
to us. We operate on a shoestring budget and have a staff of only 4 full
time people.
* Books and records
As you know, we make our books available to Sugar on an ongoing basis,
allowing you to generate your own reports. Until our accounts are closed
for the year (and audited), there's a chance that transactions may not
have been fully entered. Google recently switched payment methods for
GCI and GSoC, and we haven't adjusted the bookkeeping on that yet, so it
is lagging a bit. Google is regularly invoiced for all the GSoC and GCI
funds for all projects, and we don't think there's any concern about
payment from Google being uncertain. Google has never failed to pay
Conservancy funds owed for our member projects.
As we've mention before, if there is an item missing in the ledger that
you want us to expedite checking on, just ask us.
* Transparency
I believe Conservancy has historically been the most transparent fiscal
sponsor in free software, and we strive to stay that way. We are very
open to concrete suggestions about how we can be more transparent about
our operations (and I hope we are far from opaque)! All of our policies
are public as are all of our filings. We make the books and records
available to authorized project participants and strive to answer
questions as quickly as we can[1]. We are always on IRC at #conservancy
on freenode if you need to reach us urgently and are happy to be pinged.
* Flexibility
We will attempt to work with you to accomplish whatever Sugar Labs wants
to do that is within our charitable mission to the extent that our
resources allow. As Bradley already wrote to the sugar@ list, we can
work with reimbursing 3rd parties or handle other unusual payment
mechanisms if we understand that is the best or only way to accomplish
the project's goals.
I hope this is helpful. I know it's a tumultuous time for Sugar Labs,
and I want you to make sure that we're all on the same page about how
Conservancy operates so that we can best support the project.
karen
[1] Adam, I know that you have an email into me. I was on the road at
DebConf last week and should catch up in the next day or two.
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