[LGM] Request For Comments - reorganizing financial tasks for LGM

[Øyvind Kolås]

> GNOME was with us for less that 2 years. We eventually switched to AQDPLL
> (Canada-based non-profit corporation).
>> If we can find a way to forge a new arrangement where the processing
>> work could be offloaded to a professional bookkeeper, but one in which
>> we as LGM still retain the decision-making part of the process, we
>> believe we could speed up the reimbursement process and make it less
>> painful over the long haul.
>
> The only need here is to hire someone for a short period of time. Please
> refer to my long answer from a previous email.
>>
>> 1.2 Fundraising
>>
>> An arrangement of that sort would also allow our volunteers to spend
>> less of their time juggling competing bank-routing-system details and
>> more of their time talking to potential donors.  Here again, in recent
>> years, the job of soliciting donations has been left to a few
>> volunteers, and it is a time-consuming process -- even for
>> long-standing friends of the event who are strong supporters of free
>> software.
>>
>> A corollary to the fundraising equation is that, since we no longer
>> operate in conjunction with the GNOME Foundation, it is substantially
>> more difficult to convince potential corporate donors to support LGM.
>> This is because corporate financial officers prefer to work with
>> established, well-known entities when significant sums of money are
>> involved.

> This is not exact. We do have the ability to invoice large corporations and
> we have done it over years.

> One of the main task we failed to do over the past 11 years was to put
> together the LGM Annual Report telling what are the benefits for the
> projects in a given LGM (with both quantitative and qualitative data) and
> thus why should the corporate world support our activities. There were some
> attempts, but we never came up with a finished product. I am not blaming
> anybody — if I would, I would blame myself first. We were asked such report
> by Bdale back in 2007. We tried to gather the info from the team and I
> recall having received only one report, from one project.).
>
> Speaking of priority, this one is high and it is urgent. Unless we see this
> emergency, there is not much a new org will help us achieve that we cannot
> do already.

Lack of reporting of financial status, leading up to as well as after
events makes the exercise of organizing LGM troublesome - some
speakers indicate that they need to have their travel reimbursed to be
able to attend. Without no ongoing financial transparency/reports from
the fund raisers this isn't really possible. For some sponsors AQDPLL
(with good reason) seem unrelated to LGM when the event is not taking
place in Quebec. Having a known external entity/umbrella organization
with formal ties to LGM handling sponsorship and reimbursement will
increase transparency and allow a distributed sponsorship team
(including Louis) to work on fundraising without a single point of
delay causing attempts to actively provide funds to fall between the
cracks.

/pippin