2006-11-21

This is the proposed agenda for the Annual Board meeting of November 21st, 2006, to be held at 19:00 UTC in #spi on irc.spi-inc.org.

  1. Opening
  2. Roll call
    1. Apologies received from Jimmy Kaplowitz
  3. President's report (Bdale Garbee)
  4. Treasurer's report (Josh Berkus)
  5. Outstanding minutes
    1. October 4th, 2005
    2. October 18th, 2005
    3. November 15th, 2005
    4. December 13th, 2005
    5. October 17th, 2006
  6. Items up for discussion:
    1. Further on Debian trademark in Spain? (Resolution 2006-04-03.jfsp.1)
    2. Resolution 2006-11-21.jmb.1: Removal of OpenVAS as an associated project
    3. Resolution 2006-11-18.dbg.mjs.1: Open Source Initiative domain
    4. Outstanding items requesting comment from the DPL - see discussion
  7. Next board meeting - Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

President's Report

(none)

Treasurer's Report

Accountants

I received a 2005 statement from Mark's.   Once I pay them their balance (awaiting statement) and get a dump of their Quickbooks DB.  I expect that we will owe them about $600.  However, I do not want to terminate our agreement with Mark's until I'm sure I won't need their help for 2004 or earlier.

Rich & Bander prepared our 2005 Form 990, and are helping me with our vastly overdue state registration (see below).  I am very pleased by their fast turnaround on this.  We are paying them $650 for the Form 990.

Taxes

Our 2005 Form 990 has been filed.   Please note that since SPI is now over $100,000 annual income, we will be required to file a full Form 990 in the future every year.  Our Form 990 is sixteen pages.  This, combined with the necessity of filing a certified financial statement with the State of New York every year from 2006 on means that we do not have the option of going without a CPA again.

We are extremely (as in four years) overdue on registration with the State of New York.   When we register next month, I expect to owe them several years of back fees amounting to some $600 or so.   More daunting is the prospect that NY might demand financial statements back to 2003 or earlier, which would be very difficult for us to produce due to the poor quality of our records.

2006 tax situation will be dealt with when we are caught up on data entry for financials (see below).  Note, again, that we are officially a "medium-sized NPO" per the IRS now and our tax reporting requirements are going up significantly.

Statements - 2005

Attached is a copy of our 2005 statement and P&L from Mark's.  

My proposal is to assume that we broke even on SPI funds for 2005, since we do not have good enough records to determine which expenses are SPI's and which Debian's without extensive research.  This would make all accumulated funds Debian's.

Statements - 2006

I spent several hours with the LedgerSMB team and our CPA working out how to properly record our income and expenses using LedgerSMB.  Joerg is installing LedgerSMB 1.2 on the new treasurer server today.   Next week we will therefore be able to start earnest data entry to bring all of the revenue and expenses from 2006 up to date.

I did have a temp worker enter all revenue to early October 2006 into a spreadsheet.  Note that SPI direct donations are only $1721, and would be unlikely to exceed $2500 before the end of the year without a specific campaign.   This will not make our SPI expense budget.  The 5%, if applied back to 1/1/2006, would amount to $5999 through October, or a projected $7000 for the year.   This would cover our accounting expenses handily.

Total Revenue through the first week of October, non-reconciled, is:

Gross Transaction Fees Net SPI 5% Project Allocation Project
77845.32 405.29 77440.03 3922 73518.03 Debian
45 2.14 42.86 2.14 40.72 Gallery
1700 8.31 1691.69 84.58 1607.1 OVF
39013.05 932.63 38080.42 1904.02 36176.4 PostgreSQL
1759 37.36 1721.64 86.08 1635.56 SPI General
20.00 0.65 19.35 0.97 18.38 TeXmacs
120382.37 1386.38 118995.99 5999.8 112996.19 Grand Total

I do not have figures on expenses.  

Expect a full statement, both for 2006 and month-by-month, next month if we can get all of the data entered.   Volunteers are appreciated.

Discussion appendix

    1) Response to concerns related to the acceptance of Sun Java into
       non-free, see:
           From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
           Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 18:28:22 -0500
           Subject: Questions about Java license and related questions
           Message-ID: <20060607232822.GA31686@katherina.lan.complete.org>

    2) Response to concerns related to interaction between Debian developers
       and citizens of embargoed countries, see:
           From: Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>
           Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 17:47:49 +1000
           Subject: Debian in embargoed countries
           Message-ID: <20060609074749.GB1408@azure.humbug.org.au>

    3) Response to concerns related to online harassment, see:
           From: Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org>
           Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 17:04:51 -0700
           Subject: request for assistance with ongoing harassment
               [debianwomenpassaway@yahoo.com: Debian women: please pass away.]
           Message-ID: <20060610000450.GN13192@mauritius.dodds.net>

    4) Precise accounting of funds held for the benefit of the Debian
       project (my imprecise estimate is $0, split between -$50,000 for
       debconf, and +$50,000 for misc debian use, which will obviously
       only be useful when the HP money makes its way in)

    5) Is there any sort of online/electronic report of donations from
       Click & Pledge that can be made available?

Resolutions

2006-11-21.jmb.1
Removal of OpenVAS as an associated project

Whereas

1. The OpenVAS project site, www.openvas.org is down and has been for 3 weeks;

2. Attempts to reach OpenVAS project members have failed;

3. SPI is not holding any assets for OpenVAS to our knowledge, nor have we
received any donations for OpenVAS for over a year;

The SPI Board Resolves That

OpenVAS is hereby removed as an Associated Project.
2006-11-18.dbg.mjs.1 Open Source Initiative domain

Whereas

1. the Open Source Initiative is not part of SPI;

2. SPI still holds the Open Source Initiative's domain, "opensource.org" and
"opensource.net" which are used by the Open Source Initiative.
The SPI Board Resolves That control of the domains "opensource.org" and
"opensource.net" shall be transferred to the Open Source Initiative at the
earliest opportunity.