Donation Indicator

I’ve emailed PulkoMandy and Haiku Inc. directly with a draft for a frontpage news item where it outlines Haiku Inc’s desire for a treasurer. It goes like this:

HAIKU INC. - TREASURER POSITION AVAILABLE!

Dear Haiku community: Effective immediately, Haiku Inc.’s board of directors are looking for an individual to fulfill the position of: treasurer.

As a non-paid volunteer on Haiku Inc’s board of directors, your position will be a two-year term that concerns the financial interests of Haiku Inc. plus one vote for the not-for-profit organization’s general business.

As the treasurer for Haiku Inc. your main duties will include (amongst others):

  • processing donations
  • quarterly financial updates to the haiku-inc.org and haiku-os.org websites
  • compiling an annual IRS compliant financial report and budget that outlines a financial strategy for the organization.
  • maintain and/or implement controls on expenditure, such as who can authorize spending, upper limits before board approval is needed, and who can sign cheques.
  • suggest and control appropriate and inappropriate ways of raising money.

Applicants for this position should have a good/general understanding of accounting practices. Prior experience in a similar position is a definite asset, yet not required. If you’re looking for volunteer experience and a way to enhance your resume, do consider applying for this position by emailing us directly at: contact ( a ) haiku-inc ( . ) org

ABOUT HAIKU INC.

Haiku, Inc.was founded in New York State’s Division of Corporations as a Not-for-Profit Organization in July of 2003 by the founder, long time leader, and visionary of the Haiku Project, Michael Phipps. It is recognized by the IRS as a 501©(3) public charity, specifically as a Type C corporation pursuant to Section 201 of the Not-for-Profit Corporation Law. In a single sentence the purpose of Haiku, Inc. is to support the Haiku Project and to further the development of Haiku® through the use of its assets, which are acquired throughdonations.

Hey everyone,

I’m the current Treasurer of Haiku, Inc and I’ve been derelict in my duties for too long. I’m sorry about that, and I have my excuses like everyone else, but I won’t bore you with those.

Fortunately I’ve been working on rectifying this in the past few weeks and since I’m a developer I’ve written some code to make creating our financial reports easier, so that quarterly reports are more doable.

But first I have to address the backlog we have of yearly financial reports.

The main challenge in all this has been PayPal: we get most of our donations that way, and their CSV file format is quite complicated, plus we accept donations in dollars and Euros, and we sometimes have to convert currencies when making payments, and all of this has to be accounted correctly to the cent.

I’m happy to say I’ve finally “cracked that nut” so I think it is all downhill from here.

In addition, I’ve written another piece of code which automates summarizing our donations so that the donation meter on the website will be automated and updated daily. Since most of our donations come in through PayPal my code uses the PayPal API to download our transaction information to create this total amount. Other forms of donation will be added as needed, but for now will probably be maintained by hand but pulled in by this automated system so the donation amount is correct. For example we had three donations from Amazon Payments in August, and only one in September. Nonetheless long term I would like to get it all automated, as long as we have APIs we can call.

I still think it would be fine for us to get a new Treasurer, assuming we can find someone trustworthy who can do the job, but my current work will benefit everyone, so I want to finish that up even if we get a new Treasurer. My goal is to make it as easy as possible to do the job, because I’m assuming I’ll have to keep doing it!

  • Ryan Leavengood

You are welcome to keep the job as far as I am concerned. :grin:

Thanks for your time and effort to get this all sorted out, hopefully, people that visit the site will stay long enough now to see that the project is alive and well.

As of today, it is now fourty days since the last update.

i thought “oh hey, it ought to be updated by now” and then i donated yesterday and the only indication i have at all is a confirmation from my bank. knowing neither what’s there nor where it’s going is kind of disconcerting, honestly.

Hi spinach!

I wouldn’t say a week-old donate-o-meter should be cause for concern. We’ve had much bigger gaps… :slight_smile:
Since it’s apparently still done by hand, I suspect the meter isn’t updated more than once a month. Let’s hope the automating process will be successful soon.

Regards,
Humdinger

how does one figure out how big a gap it is between the last update and [time_of_interest]? i didn’t see any sort of indication anywhere.

There’s a date underneath the image, e.g. right now it says Updated: June 30th.

Two of the Haiku Inc. board have been replaced this month, so if you feel optimistic you could choose to imagine that signals huge improvements on the horizon.

ha, of course that was invisible till somebody pointed it out

It’s April already, could Donation Indicator be updated? Also are we going to see Donation Analysis for 2015?

It seems Donations Indicator doesn’t take cryptocurrency into account. I heard that 1 BTC has been donated to the project after Beta release but apparently, it’s not reflected in the latest Indicator update which happened today.

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CC @kallisti5, perhaps he can look into that.

Indeed. The donation tracker only tracks Paypal donations. We did receive a generous donation of 1 BTC recently. I asked the donor if they want to be thanked publically but never got a response… so I have to treat him anonymously at the moment.

I’m going to go ahead and release the financial report from 2017… it does document what our assets were as of Jan 1st 2018. I was waiting for approval from the board, but I can’t get enough people to respond to gain consensus.

I’m working on a new Haiku, Inc. website as well with better automation of the donation tracker as well. A preview is here: http://haiku-inc.netlify.com

EDIT: I just uploaded the 2017 financial report to the WIP site above. I have limited time but it should help somewhat :slight_smile:

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Donations indicator displays obsolete amount after the website restore. Currently, it displays the amount updated on 1st of August (newest one IIRC is 31st of October).

Yes, the CDN which serves the file wasn’t repopulated, and it probably won’t be until we get the new permanent server.