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devanooga / devanooga.com

devanooga website
https://www.devanooga.com/
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Transparency page? #224

Open DigTK opened 5 years ago

DigTK commented 5 years ago

I've seen this being thrown around on Slack, should we add a page where we disclose where our funds go? Donations and whatnot?

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

This has been discussed briefly before, we can totally make how much is donated easily transparent, and how much we spend where (though this is all an annoying manual process). We strive for transparency so I totally love the idea though.

There was some talk about making donors public, I'm technically fine with this, but I'm not sure how the rest feel. Maybe tags on the member page would be awesome for that. Stuff like Amazon Smile is opaque to me though.

I can take our 990-N for last year and put it on the site with a decent break-down, that would be easy.

For stuff we're doing this year -- uh live reports is kind of a pain, but I'll see if I can't find a nice place between "doing it once a year" and "entering every transaction as it comes in".

If I could dump Quickbooks to a JSON blob and load that to our meta repo (that our site would pull in for some kind of transparency report page) that would be A+. For now it'll be manual and that'll probably be nice enough.

Another thing we may also post -- how about transparency for things we're attempting to budget, various projects and their cost.

brb3 commented 5 years ago

There was some talk about making donors public, I'm technically fine with this, but I'm not sure how the rest feel.

I think this should definitely default to being private. If donors want to be made public, we could, but unless they explicitely opt-in, we should keep their names private.

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

@brb3 what about sponsors should we allow them to be private?

brb3 commented 5 years ago

@StrangeWill What's the difference between a sponsor and a donor?

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

@brb3 a business vs. a person, in my mind.

There has been concern about corporate influence over Devanooga before, having to be transparent about that may be a good thing. I dunno. Just an idea.

brb3 commented 5 years ago

I could see that being a concern.

Ok, what if we defaulted individual donations to private, but corporate sponsorships would have to be public?

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

I think that would be an ideal default.

agarzola commented 5 years ago

Just catching up on this. It strikes me that someone interested in knowing that corporate donations/sponsorships are always public to keep devanooga leadership accountable might also be interested in knowing that no individual circumvents that rule by making private personal donations while effectively representing their company’s interests. Obviously, I know you guys wouldn’t do that, but putting my :tinfoilhat: on I can see how someone would.

brb3 commented 5 years ago

That thought process is flawed because it requires that we somehow act in the interest of private donors. That's not what we do.

agarzola commented 5 years ago

Ah, then corporate donations could also be private, because that’s not what you do. :)

brb3 commented 5 years ago

But a corporation donating is a coporation donating.

agarzola commented 5 years ago

I’m playing devil’s advocate here. @StrangeWill said

There has been concern about corporate influence over Devanooga before, having to be transparent about that may be a good thing.

Someone for whom the only way to ensure there is no “corporate influence over Devanooga” is to make corporate donations public (i.e. “you don’t have to just trust us, here’s a list of all public donations”) might be inclined to also only be appeased if individual donations are also public because, who’s to say that some company doesn’t exert influence via one of its executives making “private personal donations” to devanooga?

brb3 commented 5 years ago

Again, that would imply that we are doing things for private donors. Some kind of quid pro quo. Also, consider the tax implications for the corporation: it doesn't touch their books at all. So they are paying an employee to donate money to devanooga? That seems like quite a bit of a stretch, doesn't it?

agarzola commented 5 years ago

Like I said, :tinfoilhat:.

brb3 commented 5 years ago

Ok. I think it's safe to completely ignore that then. It doesn't have any basis in reality.

agarzola commented 5 years ago

Neither does

concern about corporate influence over Devanooga

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

Actually: I had thought the same thing as @agarzola brings up about "why should only corporations be public, individuals can influence us easily too". I've been just weighing where we land on the argument of privacy vs. transparency.

In my mind:

It may just be that we're more likely to have corporate tampering than individual and that personal privacy trumps that -- and that we ask that people be transparent in their donations if they're comfortable with that.

I mean ultimately we do see money coming in, we just don't know from who. You see a $1000 anonymous donation and feel free to give me a hard time about that.

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

On that note: 2017 transactions were loaded in the meta repo here: https://github.com/devanooga/devanooga-meta/blob/master/accounting/finances/2017.yml

I'll be loading up 2018 soon and do a partial of 2019. We'll have to sort out how to pull the yml files from the meta repo into the site, convert them to JSON and load them up in something cool like highcharts/d3/whatever.

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

@seabre did just bring up in chat:

i mean i kind of like full transparency. if you don't want that dollar amount known then don't donate

Which I can totally see that being a thing, I pointed out I wouldn't retroactively do it though, but that's totally an option.

agarzola commented 5 years ago

The scenario I'm thinking is likelier than some random individual wanting to buy influence for his own damn self is: Dipshit McFuckface, who owns some corporate software developer shop in town, wants to turn devanooga into his company's own corporate-run “developer community” that's really just a PR platform for peddling bullshit. He doesn't want it publicly known, however, so he makes a private personal contribution and buys influence that way. His company doesn't get to deduct that, but he does, which is effectively the same thing (since, again, he owns the company or a part of it and will be using profit share to pay that big-ass donation). He gets the influence he wants and devanooga leadership gets to preserve a semblance of “no corporate shenanigans.”

As I stated above: everyone in this comment thread knows that the people running devanooga would not allow that to happen. But this isn't about trusting leadership, but about not having to trust leadership because information is out in the open. Anyone who doesn't personally know you guys has no reason to just trust the above scenario isn't occurring, unless personal donations are also made public in one way or another.

One thing that would help curb this while respecting privacy for most individual donors is to put a threshold on the amount for private donations by individuals. e.g. donations made by individuals must be made public if they exceed a certain amount, or if the total donated throughout a rolling period of one year exceeds another amount. For example (and these are totally made up numbers, I'm not suggesting them at all, they just make the math easy): single donations that exceed $50 or donations that put an individual’s total contribution for the rolling year above $600 must be made public.

How does that sound?

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

As I stated above: everyone in this comment thread knows that the people running devanooga would not allow that to happen. But this isn't about trusting leadership, but about not having to trust leadership because information is out in the open. Anyone who doesn't personally know you guys has no reason to just trust the above scenario isn't occurring, unless personal donations are also made public in one way or another.

100% agreed, I don't like the "but trust us" side of things, it's why even if we were to support anonymous donations that I'd want the donations themselves visible. I don't want staff to be seen as some authority figure that must be appealed to, we're just here to help facilitate the healthy existence of the community, and our transparency helps that.

[...] How does that sound?

I like the threshold idea but....

Most of the people that have donated already pipped up in #devanooga or at hacknight saying they're fine with having donations be 100% public knowledge, so we'll probably just make that what we do. Considering this makes up pretty much everyone that has donated recently I'm inclined to move in that direction (eg: those with something to risk with the transparency has said they felt it's no risk).

As James pointed out in chat -- starting from a position of "data privacy first" is a good point to start with, but it seems everyone is full ahead with transparency on this. So we'll probably just do that (of course not retroactively), amend the CoC with donation transparency policies and revisit this in the future if anyone actually thinks the transparency is a problem.

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

Created PR #226 for CoC update.

brb3 commented 5 years ago

I am not full ahead with transparency on this, no.

Donations: public always Donors: private by default Sponsorships (corporate underwriting): public always

That's my stance. There's no evidence that devanooga can somehow be "bought". There is evidence that people want their private financial decisions to remain private.

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

There is evidence that people want their private financial decisions to remain private.

Do you have said evidence to present? So far I've gone through the full donation list and their information is either currently public (see: yours from me asking at hacknight), or those that aren't:

If you got people cash-in-hand interested in giving us money if we stay private, let me know.

StrangeWill commented 5 years ago

Merged #226, still need to get spending for 2018 up though (I'll be sure it's all good when our 990N goes out)

StrangeWill commented 3 years ago

Finances are listed over at https://github.com/devanooga/devanooga-meta/tree/master/accounting/finances, 2020 hasn't been entered yet (guess what: empty due to COVID outside of RoushTech probably pushing some cash for legal filings that year).

I'll get those updated and see about dropping a page detailing where everything is.

StrangeWill commented 3 years ago

Added a lot of the basics in #276, how that's for a start?