--- Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:

I think the board should do a budget/financial meeting soon. The last one was done a trimester ago, so it is high time.

Yep it is.

It seems to me we probably largely differed from our first trimester budget planning (but I may be wrong :-)). If so, I presume it will be due to the various hosting offers we got... In any cases, I think it would be most informative to see where we are going...

I was planning on just asking the board to extend last quarter�s budget to also cover this quarter, since that is what actually is happening. I had hoped that we would *finally* be able to buy much more than we needed and thus get ahead of traffic increases but that did not seem to happen. A supplemental budget could be added along with a supplemental fund drive if needed.

Mav I have been wondering in the past few days if you could provide us an update on our financial situation ? Both general report (quick update on values) and later one of your nice quaterly report on the foundation website would be most welcome... I suppose you will answer me that you did not receive banking statements yet to do so... but I guess Terry could help there more than he could before.

You suppose right. :) The problem has been on my end (my fax machine was not working). As of this week it should be working now, so I�ll remind Terry about that.

Question for developers : I'd like us to be informed on a non technical level of the future technical requirements to expect and possibly to be reminded how much we can expect from partners on this. Ie, how much is planned in the future to spend on servers, hosting and so on. I am sure you will answer it is tough to say, I know :-)

Yes - this is very, very much needed. I asked for a needs/wants/wish list for the last budget but that never materialized. Thus we brought in a whole bunch of money with no concrete plan on how to spend it. That is not something I want to repeat.

The general idea would be to try to evaluate how long the money we have in the bank will last... and if we can envision spending some of it on more creative ways than servers :-) Opinion on this topic ?

We need some numbers on that first.

PS : I must mention that we are currently stuck in a rather ridiculous situation. The french squids needs some RAM... this RAM can only be purchased in a few websites... which refuse american credit cards... so we are currently trying to have it bought by the german association... which legally is not really authorized to do this... so, either the french association quickly has cash to pay for such expenses, or the foundation should have a credit card in europe to take care of such matters... opinion ?

We could wire some money to the French chapter�s bank account.

-- mav

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