{"id":427,"date":"2009-01-11T03:19:23","date_gmt":"2009-01-10T17:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/?p=427"},"modified":"2009-01-11T03:20:32","modified_gmt":"2009-01-10T17:20:32","slug":"linux-australia-financial-status","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/2009\/01\/11\/linux-australia-financial-status","title":{"rendered":"Linux Australia Financial Status"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So the pre-AGM drafts of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linux.org.au\/\">LA<\/a>&#8216;s financial status are up, in particular the <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.linux.org.au\/pipermail\/linux-aus\/2009-January\/017204.html\">2007\/08 financial year summary<\/a> and the (hopefully) easier to follow <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.linux.org.au\/pipermail\/linux-aus\/2009-January\/017208.html\">bottom line figures<\/a> (also, the <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.linux.org.au\/pipermail\/linux-aus\/2009-January\/017205.html\">2006\/07 financial year summary<\/a> since I couldn&#8217;t find it online elsewhere). I&#8217;m pretty happy with them, both in what the tell us about the health of the organisation and linux.conf.au, and in the level of detail that&#8217;s available (not too little, but not too much to be overwhelming either, hopefully). I think it&#8217;s at about the level I&#8217;d expect of a professionally run organisation (which is, of course, also what I expect of volunteer-run free software organisations). There aren&#8217;t any <a href=\"http:\/\/flowingdata.com\/2008\/09\/19\/pie-i-have-eaten-and-pie-i-have-not-eaten\/\">pie-charts<\/a>, though.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s still a few problems with the treasury in general:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> we still have problems getting bills paid and reimbursements organised properly (though I think that&#8217;s improving),<\/li>\n<li>we don&#8217;t have good budgeting processes yet (though I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s possible to have a good budget until you&#8217;re confident in your understanding of your current and historical financials),<\/li>\n<li>we don&#8217;t have very good document handling (the treasury&#8217;s made up of an unfun mix of papers, emails and other electronic stuff none of which is really well indexed); and<\/li>\n<li>we don&#8217;t yet have good transitional processes (for when we get a new treasurer, or in how to improve our systems incrementally instead of always replacing them entirely).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>With some misgivings (the other council members have had to pick up a fair bit of slack on my behalf this year, Terry and Steve in particular), I&#8217;ve accepted the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linux.org.au\/membership\/index.php?page=view-election&amp;id=12\">nomination<\/a> to continue as treasurer into 2009; with the primary hopes to get the first and the last bullet points above improved, and maybe also get some budgeting happening.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, I don&#8217;t have much idea on how to improve our document handling to something a bit saner, let alone something I&#8217;d actually consider good. <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.linux.org.au\/\">Moinmoin<\/a> is okay, I guess, and the Drupal CMS on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linux.org.au\/\">website proper<\/a> is at least pretty, but I don&#8217;t think either would really cope with dumping all our receipts, invoices, and other paperwork into them. Using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.atlassian.com\/software\/confluence\/\">Confluence<\/a> (which I&#8217;ve been reviewing lately for other purposes, and am growing to quite like) might be an effective approach, but while it does run on Linux, and is used by various <a href=\"http:\/\/www.antlr.org\/wiki\/dashboard.action\">free<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.codehaus.org\/dashboard.action\">software<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/cwiki.apache.org\/confluence\/dashboard.action\">projects<\/a>, it&#8217;s not free software (everyone who buys it gets source access, everyone who doesn&#8217;t, doesn&#8217;t; there&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.cnet.com\/8301-13505_3-9760614-16.html?tag=mncol;txt\">cnet interview<\/a> for anyone who cares), and I&#8217;m not sure if that&#8217;s where we want to go in as much as we&#8217;re a national FOSS organsition&#8230; Oh well, hopefully whoever&#8217;s elected secretary will solve that problem somehow.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, thought I might blog that for anyone who&#8217;s interested but isn&#8217;t already following <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.linux.org.au\/listinfo\/linux-aus\">linux-aus<\/a>. Comments are open for anyone with anything to add. :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So the pre-AGM drafts of LA&#8216;s financial status are up, in particular the 2007\/08 financial year summary and the (hopefully) easier to follow bottom line figures (also, the 2006\/07 financial year summary since I couldn&#8217;t find it online elsewhere). I&#8217;m pretty happy with them, both in what the tell us about the health of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions\/432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}