Revitalization of npoacct project; Brett Smith will take over as project lead
Frederico Guth
fredguth at fredguth.com
Fri Aug 26 16:28:27 UTC 2016
Brett, Bradley and others,
We are still interested in helping. We happen to be developing another app
using JS and PouchDB, being able to create mobile and desktop (Electron) apps
in javascript that work offline and can be synched only when there is internet
connection.
\--Fred
On Aug 26 2016, at 8:44 am, Daniel Pocock <daniel at pocock.pro> wrote:
> On 25/08/16 23:06, Brett Smith wrote:
> On 08/25/2016 12:32 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Nice to meet you all. A bit more about me: I’m coming to Conservancy
> from Curoverse, where I helped develop Arvados
> <https://dev.arvados.org/>, an AGPLed big data analysis platform focused
> on bioinformatics. Arvados consists of several components, responsible
> for individual tasks such as data storage, compute dispatch, and Web
> interface.
>
> One reason I bring this up is because that structure helped inspire this
> move, to start by building a system for filing reimbursement requests.
> Ideally, a system to file reimbursement requests will eventually
> integrate with all the different bookkeeping systems that people use. We
> can start out with simple functionality like “Export to .format,” and
> over time we can make those integrations more user-friendly, and add new
> ones. This lets us solve a problem organizations have today, relatively
> quickly; and as we continue work on the rest of the NPO Accounting
> project, building the core accounting system, the reimbursement handler
> can still work with that no matter how it shakes out. And we can
> similarly build components to handle other specific tasks around accounting.
>
> In other words, part of the motivation for this approach is to try to
> avoid reinventing the wheel. If there are FLOSS systems for receiving
> reimbursement requests that people know about, definitely please do
> share; I’d much rather build from what exists than start from scratch.
> Unfortunately nothing’s been mentioned in the initial conversations I’ve
> had with organization leaders this week.
>
>
> The focus on reimbursement requests seems like a great choice. I
regularly come across developers who are afraid of asking for money to
go to an event or simply deterred by the time and energy that it takes
getting through online booking web sites, keeping up with prices that
constantly change, getting through airports and then doing paperwork to
get paid. Just fixing one of those things might have a real impact on
participation.
>
> I actually feel that if some of the NPOs mentioned were able to spend
money more easily and able to report on it with less effort, they would
be able to give more feedback to donors who might give more money.
Instead, the situation we have now is that volunteers (and paid staff,
where they exist), put a lot of their energy into the more mundane
duties of reimbursing people manually and this is energy they could use
for fundraising or hacking.
>
> I started a separate thread about the theme of expense tracking apps.
>
> One other thing that comes to mind: what is the scope of this project?
Is it just for submitting receipts? Or should the project cover the
whole process from budgeting, requesting approval, purchasing and
submitting the receipt? For example, a whole workflow might look like this:
>
> \- budgeting: organization approves a budget of $5,000 to assist
developers attend some event
>
> \- requesting approval: 16 developers submit requests asking for $8,192
>
> \- approval: somebody chooses the developers who will go, maybe allowing
$4,500 and keeping $500 in reserve for foreign exchange costs, bank
fees, changing flight prices, etc (at this stage, PGP signed emails sent
to the lucky developers)
>
> \- submitting: the developers submit their receipts, only $4,200 has
actually been spent so two more people are allowed to go
>
> \- payment: after the event, somebody does a sanity check before
releasing the funds (did each developer really show up?). Maybe some
people are sent their money in advance because they are students or
buying expensive international tickets.
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