international flavors, first steps for the project, and fundraising issues (was Re: Status on NPO Accounting project: Conservancy seeks a contractor to begin work)

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Marc Paré wrote at 05:19 (EDT):
> I personally would have liked to see more of an international push,
> but this is my personal opinion on this.

I would have liked to as well.  But, I want to make sure that Phase 0&1
of the project are truly doable in one year of work by one developer, so
we limited the initial scope.

> I hope that it all works out then with this approach. 

Nevertheless, one of the standing directives for the project, IMO,
should be to not make jurisdictional assumptions "low down" in the
stack, and anything that looks or smells like a jurisdictional
assumption should be as "high up" as possible and optional, not a
mandatory workflow.

I also want to start the project by writing use-cases, and adding
international use-cases to the mix would help make sure we don't screw
this up.  I hope you and other non-USA folks on the list can help with
that when we get there.

> As many organizations (such as ours) are driven by volunteers and in
> many cases, some smaller groups have not enough income to hire an
> accountant. A GUI with a short learning curve will at least give these
> groups a running chance at figuring out the accounting process without
> having to fight with a confusing GUI.

Indeed.  Frankly, Conservancy already *has* a very good setup with
Ledger CLI that works, but of course has no GUI and requires that person
in the bookkeeper role be a bit of a developer (or at the very least, a
command-line jockey with a programmer's mindset).  Frankly, if I thought
I could find a programmer who wanted to be a bookkeeper all day --
notwithstanding my long-standing desire to make this project happen (see
below) -- Conservancy probably would have just hired a programmer to
keep the books (which is effectively what we're doing now anyway, since
I keep Conservancy's books myself).

Meanwhile, one useful community contribution that I want make first off
is to document and release the system we're using now.  It alone might
be useful to a non-profit org that is run primarily by developers (and
there are a few of those around)!  In that vein:

The scripts we use on top of Ledger CLI are already upstreamed at:
https://github.com/ledger/ledger/tree/master/contrib/non-profit-audit-reports

... and I furthermore personally set out to document publicly how
Conservancy does NPO accounting with Ledger CLI.  See:
    https://gitorious.org/ledger/npo-ledger-cli/

Documentation there is about 20% complete and I do expect to finish that
as an early part of this project.  While I'm not wedded to the idea of
"building a GUI on top of what we've already done with Ledger CLI", I
think it's one of the (now many) viable options that I want to seriously
evaluate in Phase 0 of the project, once Conservancy gets someone
on-board to do that work.  I hope Phase 0 can go quickly once we find
someone.

I've also offered -- as a pure volunteer -- to help SPI use the existing
system I've got going for Conservancy.  That would help feed into
getting good documentation (a second setup would help iron out kinks).
That offer remains if SPI folks want to take it up at any time.

> [Canadian] arts organizations receive some considerable amount of
> government funding income, but that when it comes to the non-profit
> accounting process, that, more often than not, a large portion of our
> revenues are spent on either fund accounting software (mostly
> Quickbooks with annual costly updates) or hiring an accountant/agency
> with fund accounting specialization.

Indeed, this is very common here in the USA, too.  Conservancy has had
informal discussions with non-profits of all sizes here in the USA, and
they all pay huge amounts of funds in licensing fees and/or
staff-support-to-file-bugs-with-proprietary-vendor costs for their
accounting infrastructure.  (ISTR Josh Berkus has a funny-sad story
about such a situation, but I don't know if he can tell it publicly so
I'll let him chime in if he can.)

For my part, I've been pitching something similar to what you see on
https://sfconservancy.org/campaign/ as far back is the early 2000s to
big grant-making orgs like Mellon MacArthur, Omidyar, etc..  My primary
talking point was always that it's in *their* interest to fund software
like this, since so many orgs receiving grants from them are effectively
siphoning off some of that money to pay BlackBaud or Great Plains or
someone else instead of spending it on mission work.

Sadly, after years of working off-and-on on that sort of fundraising,
I've never got any of those grant-makers interested, which is (in part)
why, after a decade of off-and-on trying to make this project happen,
Conservancy launched the public campaign.

The problem is actually harder than it looks.  There are orgs out there
like NTEN (who advocate for more and better technology use by
non-profits) telling non-profits that "Open Source is ok, but it's
usually no better nor less costly than proprietary software" [0].  We've
got a lot of FUD to fight in the non-profit space.

In the end, I suspect that this situation is almost the same as other
proprietary software cartels: paying the cartel is just seen as a 'cost
of doing business' and no one really thinks about any long-term
consequences.  I'm reminded of proprietary software systems like
AutoCAD, which is seen by designers and engineers as a "must have"
software to do their job, and while millions in licensing fees flow to
AutoDesk every year, no one will step out of the prisoners' dilemma and
fund a Free Software replacement long term, since that'd be more costly
*now*, even if over 20 years, it's clearly going to be cheaper.

Ok, my ranty-ness above notwithstanding, Conservancy remains committed
to finding a way to make this project happen somehow.  Like most Free
Software efforts, it'll probably move slower than any of us would like,
but if the Free Software world has taught me anything, it's that slow
and steady development wins the race.  We've got "slow" down already;
and I'm working arduously to get us "steady" as well. :)

[0] http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/06/01/holly-ross-nten.html
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy