Revitalization of npoacct project; Brett Smith will take over as project lead

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

As most of you know, we've been trying to raise funds for NPO accounting
-- both publicly at https://sfconservancy.org/npoacct/ and via grants --
for years now.  We sadly never reached even our first fundraising
target, as you can see on that page.  We used those funds successfully
in the survey that Joar did, and also to build some reasonably good
documentation ( http://k.sfconservancy.org/npo-ledger-cli ).  The latter
helped SPI to move their books into a similar system to Conservancy's.
But these were admittedly the only successes this project had so far.

Meanwhile, as we saw in the thread back in May on this mailing list,
representatives of Conservancy's member projects, such as Sugar Labs,
have a strong interest in seeing advancement of this project.  However,
no one has been able to route additional funding our way earmarked for
this project.  For my part, I become more of a domain expert every day,
but that's because I must spend much of my time keeping the books of
Conservancy rather than writing software to make the task easier.

Conservancy  however had some success in our general fundraising such
that Conservancy hired an additional full-time staffer, Brett Smith, who
joined this week: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2016/aug/22/brett-joins/

Brett has extensive software development, design, and software team
leadership experience.  His experience in these areas is much more
current than mine, and so after discussions with Brett, I have decided
that it makes the most sense to hand over leadership of this project
directly to Brett.  Brett will spend 50% of his Conservancy work time on
this project.  I will give as much time as I can, particularly to
provide (and coordinate input from others with) domain expertise.  And,
maybe I'll even do some hacking, if Brett approves my pull requests. ;)

We also have a plan for an initial direction.  Over the last year, I've
been talking with SPI and other charities about needs, and also
assessing Conservancy's most urgent needs for bookkeeping.  Much of my
bookkeeping time is spent handling reimbursements and payments to
external parties -- paying invoices for software development work done,
travel expenses, conference costs, and the like.  Both SPI and the GNOME
Foundation indicate they spend much of their time in this area as well.

Therefore, we've decided to take a low-hanging fruit approach: build a
better online system for handling outgoing payments, and reimbursements
requests in particular.  The idea is to get software to ask a
payment-seeker the right questions up front to mold the request into a
state that makes it smooth and fast for a bookkeeper to process.
Brett, Karen, and I believe that this will provide a more immediate
benefit to the charities in the Open Source and Free Software community,
and also allow us to further prototype an underlying API for accounting
data storage.

One key design requirement that I requested is that the system remain
adaptable on how it interfaces with the accounting backend.  Obviously
exporting to support SPI and Conservancy's Ledger-CLI based system will
be a necessity, but we'd like to make this usable by as many charities
in our community as possible.  I'll be reaching out to SPI, GNOME
Foundation, FSF, and other charities and groups to welcome them to join
the list and give their input on any requirements.

So, we're moving again!  I expect the #npoacct channel on freenode and
this list to become active in the next few days with plenty of
discussion on this initiative.  Those who have volunteered to get
involved, there's now something to volunteer for!

Thank you all for your patience in following this project.  It's been a
long and somewhat desolate road.  I must thank the Conservancy
Supporters that made it possible for us to hire Brett, and -- apologies
in advance for the fundraising pitch -- I hope those of you that aren't
Supporters yet will click on the link in my .sig and financially support
Brett's work on this.  It's the only way we'll get this done!
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn
President & Distinguished Technologist of Software Freedom Conservancy
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