Transparency page?

[DigTK]

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]

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.

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

[brb3]

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]

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

[brb3]

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

[StrangeWill]

@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]

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]

I think that would be an ideal default.

[agarzola]

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]

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]

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

[brb3]

But a corporation donating is a coporation donating.

[agarzola]

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]

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?