[Sur] [SLOBS] [IAEP] URGENT action needed

[Karen Sandler]

Hi SLOBs,

Conservancy staff doesn't follow our member projects mailing lists - the 
PROJECT en sfconservancy.org are always the official communication point 
between Conservancy and its member projects. As I hope you can 
appreciate, we have 45 member projects (including Outreachy, which has 
around 80 internships per year that we administer). This thread has come 
to our attention though, and I want to clear up a few things.

* Good communication with Conservancy

We rely on SLOBs and the official Sugar representative to let us know 
when you approve some action and need us to do something. For example, 
no one notified us of the election results earlier in this year. In 
researching the issues that came up today, we discovered that the 
election happened, and we will update our records under the Fiscal 
Sponsorship Agreement (and the sugar@ alias) accordingly. We don't 
object to hiring someone to communicate with us or to rely on 
volunteers. If you do hire someone, we will rely on volunteers to let us 
know that the paid representative should be paid and that we can rely on 
their instructions (and then again if you decide not to have that person 
work for you anymore). We expect to communicate directly with the sugar@ 
alias and we cannot be expected to closely read mailing lists dedicated 
to other matters in case there is something mentioned that is relevant 
to us. We operate on a shoestring budget and have a staff of only 4 full 
time people.

* Books and records

As you know, we make our books available to Sugar on an ongoing basis, 
allowing you to generate your own reports. Until our accounts are closed 
for the year (and audited), there's a chance that transactions may not 
have been fully entered. Google recently switched payment methods for 
GCI and GSoC, and we haven't adjusted the bookkeeping on that yet, so it 
is lagging a bit. Google is regularly invoiced for all the GSoC and GCI 
funds for all projects, and we don't think there's any concern about 
payment from Google being uncertain. Google has never failed to pay 
Conservancy funds owed for our member projects.

As we've mention before, if there is an item missing in the ledger that 
you want us to expedite checking on, just ask us.

* Transparency

I believe Conservancy has historically been the most transparent fiscal 
sponsor in free software, and we strive to stay that way. We are very 
open to concrete suggestions about how we can be more transparent about 
our operations (and I hope we are far from opaque)! All of our policies 
are public as are all of our filings. We make the books and records 
available to authorized project participants and strive to answer 
questions as quickly as we can[1]. We are always on IRC at #conservancy 
on freenode if you need to reach us urgently and are happy to be pinged.

* Flexibility

We will attempt to work with you to accomplish whatever Sugar Labs wants 
to do that is within our charitable mission to the extent that our 
resources allow. As Bradley already wrote to the sugar@ list, we can 
work with reimbursing 3rd parties or handle other unusual payment 
mechanisms if we understand that is the best or only way to accomplish 
the project's goals.

I hope this is helpful. I know it's a tumultuous time for Sugar Labs, 
and I want you to make sure that we're all on the same page about how 
Conservancy operates so that we can best support the project.

karen

[1] Adam, I know that you have an email into me. I was on the road at 
DebConf last week and should catch up in the next day or two.