Exploring the possibility of better NPO support in LedgerSMB

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Chris,

I appreciate your enthusiasm and interest in helping with the
evaluation.  Frankly, though, I am not sure there is much those who are
major contributors to the existing accounting packages can do, other
than be very responsive to questions and inquiries, which you've already
offered and which I greatly appreciate.  We obviously want to avoid the
idea that the evaluation was biased because it was prepared by projects
that were seeking selection.  I think the fact that you've shown up and
offered help is a big point in favor of your community, and I suspect
that should be part of the criteria.

Another thing I want to note is the difficulty in fiscal sponsorship
accounting.  Josh posted on the list about how there are a lot of types
of non-profits, and in Conservancy's proposal we've already indicated
that it's extremely important for us to meet the needs of fiscal
sponsors.  This is in part because (a) we have to put on our own oxygen
mask before helping others, and (b) this is an area that no software
currently takes care of, so it's an opportunity to do something that
proprietary software can't even do yet.

I've actually got a working accounting system based on Ledger CLI now
that handles fiscal sponsors well (as discussed in the proposal) with
the downside of needing a hacker to keep the records.  I'm focusing my
time over the next few weeks in documenting that.  One thing that might
be worth doing is to follow that work and see what the equivalent would
be in LedgerSMB or how it would be implemented. 

> The transparency is important, but to whatever extent there can be
> active participation in evaluation and feedback by NPO's (to the
> extent they are willing to donate time), that would be helpful too.

I'd love for other NPOs to show up and help us, and that's the main
reason I created this mailing list as part of the fundraising campaign.
Already GNOME Foundation and FSF have offered to be involved in the
evaluations, and I hope that others will join.  I agree with you fully
that having more NPOs involved as we evaluate the initial codebase would
be helpful.

But, I reached out to a lot of NPOs before launching, and the ones you
see endorsing are the only ones that seemed particularly interested in
what we're doing.  Others said: "We're using the proprietary solution
we've got; no chance we can spare time to participate in what you're
doing; build something and we'll check it out when it works".

Thus, I tend to think we know the list of NPOs that want to be involved
in evaluation, and they're already on the list of endorsing the
campaign.  We'll have to get something that works for all of us, and do
our best to make sure it's extensible.  We won't be able please everyone
on the first phase: neither the existing projects that all want us to
"pick them", nor the entire NPO sector.


Finally, I want to note that Conservancy can only do lead this project
if we can fund the staff time to do it.  The reason this project started
with a fundraising campaign is that Conservancy has been struggling for
years with limited staff time just to keep together the system we're
using.  Also, multiple attempts have been started at various times in
the FLOSS Foundations community which showed that no one was going to
take lead on a project like this.

Thus, while I understand and appreciate the enthusiasm that the folks
showing up want to move quickly -- and everyone should feel free to do
whatever they think is useful to the project -- it's probably unlikely
that Conservancy can act quickly, and we probably won't start work in
earnest until we've reached our fundraising target.  My personal
(initial) staff time to the project, in addition to working on
fundraising of course, is focused on documenting Conservancy's current
accounting system so we can examine it as part of the codebase
evaluation.
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy