minimizing people's views (was: Merchandise production)

Daniel Pocock daniel at pocock.pro
Wed Aug 29 20:56:12 UTC 2018


On 27/08/18 12:49, Reinhard Müller wrote:
> Dear Daniel,
>
> after reading your email twice, I still can't make any sense of it,
> unless it's just a rant by intention. Especially I can read neither an

Why minimizing other people's views with such disparaging comments?

Making comments like that, rather than trying to understand what other
people are getting at, is just putting petrol on the fire.


> application for membership from it, nor a resignation. Anyway, I'll

That makes me feel you didn't read the same email then.  It is not a
resignation, it is a call for the president's resignation.

> focus on the one item that falls in my responsibility as the former
> financial officer:
>
> Am 2018-08-27 um 13:19 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
>> People are asking how FSFE e.V. can raise[5] almost EUR 650,000 in one
>> year and spend barely EUR 37,000 on producing merchandise.
> I don't understand what exactly the question is: why FSFE didn't spend
> more on producing merchandise? Or why FSFE didn't spend less? Or what
> kind of merchandise we spent it on?
>
> Could you, or the other people who are asking that, please be more
> specific about that question?

The public financial report[5] groups all expenditure into just 6
high-level categories

For an organization committed to transparency, a lot more detail could
be provided there.  Doing so would not only stop speculation but may
actually encourage people to give more.

The budget circulated privately contains about 100 lines of data and I
could learn a lot more from studying that, so I feel that either the
whole thing should be made public or at least a bit more of the details,
for example, total commitments to permanent staff, total long term
commitments (leases, loan repayments), etc.

It would be good to publish some ratios, for example, the percentage of
total revenue that funds permanent staff and percentage of funds from
private vs corporate.

It would also be helpful to publish some comments about how the budget
really works: for example, if one or two of the big sponsors pulled out,
which area of expenditure would be cut?  Would somebody be sacked, would
a campaign be suspended?  These things help understand how much the
staff are subconsciously impacted by the corporate money.

Regards,

Daniel


5. https://fsfe.org/about/funds/2016.en.html





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