On 5/18/07, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Actually, I have more idea that I would want to say, because I believe saying it publicly would not be good business :-) But getting good figures is a priority. Which is why I discussed in length the issue with Carolyn about 2 months ago, and Carolyn and the accountant are currently working on categorizing revenue and expenses, which will allow us to have a much better feedback. She is also currently preparing all data to get ready for the audit.
Regular financial statements were promised by Brad almost a year ago. But today you make the statement: "I have some estimates of some values for the current year. But I do not have clear precise data month by month." Forget about *getting* pathetic. That *is* pathetic.
We do business. That is not a wish, that is a statement. Now, we do not do it very well, and staff is already overworked, so can not give more time to it. Two solutions. One is to proceed not doing it well since no time. We can decide not to answer the phone as well, and to put propositions received by mail in the trash. Make no DVDs. No datafeed. The other is to better organize the area. Which is our choice.
The WMF is not a business. It's a publicly supported charity. As such, I think the proper solution is to limit business activities as much as possible. For instance, data feed services should focus on the distribution aspects (getting a datafeed to as many people as possible) instead of the profiteering aspects (making as much money off the datafeed as possible).
Now, please take a step backward.
Do you remember that just ONE year ago, we had only 2 employees, one being Brion in California (so, tech area) and the other Danny (the "do it all", "save the day" man) ? We did not have any clean financial statements ? Officially, Jimbo was our CEO, so in charge of accounting, which he did not really have time to do.
In one year, we created an office. There are people working in, issuing data we can rely on. We have enough money to run with, without having to bother you every couple of weeks. The website is hardly down any more now, which was not the case 2 years ago, whilst the traffic was much smaller. We pay our bills. And we pay them in time (not the case a year ago). Our financial statements may not be perfectly detailed, but they are *clean*. We have people answering the phone. We have a framework to receive interns (not the case a year ago). We have a file server in the office and a secure network. We set up a fundraising database to track every donation. We set up an acceptable procedure (by audit standard) to receive checks and cash them. And so on.
And this is *getting* pathetic ?
Hardly.
Fair enough, you've accomplished a number of things in the past year. You've gone from Jimbo as CEO to Brad as ED to having no one as CEO or ED - three steps each progressing beyond the previous. But it seems to me things are progressing far far too slowly. I say that this is getting pathetic not in that things are getting worse, but that more and more time is going by without the glaring problems being resolved.
Anthony