Re: [Debconf-team] WRL (debit card) phone chat
On Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 06:22:34PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Hmmm. I'm a little worried by the costs here, I must be honest. What
> precisely do we gain from using these cards?
We gain the ability to give a cash equivalent that won't get SPI into legal or
tax trouble. As I said in a different mail, we can't just give out arbitrary
cash to people as a charity, but we can pay incidental expenses relative to
them doing something connected with our mission, like food necessary to attend
DebConf. If we just handed over cash we'd need some kind of documentation of
the expenditures, which is ok for things like petty cash reimbursement but not
convenient for this. However, see below for an IMHO more accurate way to look
at the costs.
> >Pricing
> >=======
> >* Per-order cost: $2.95 per card plus $21.95 shipping
> >* Under the program we're planning to do, there would be no time-based fees
> > (e.g. recurring maintenance charges)
> >* Setup cost: $500 (covered by SPI general funds not Deb* funds)
>
> So: overhead cost for these is ~$3 per card plus $500. For ~185 cards
> that adds up to over a thousand dollars!?!
The $500 is more appropriately not included in the cost evaluation; it's a one
time fee that SPI would be paying from general funds (NOT Debian and also NOT
DebConf10), and it will enable SPI to offer this kind of debit card service to
any SPI associated project that needs it in the future, whether DebConf or a
mini-DebConf or some PostgreSQL or Madwifi/OpenWrt conference, etc. The $500
would not need to be repeated for future orders.
Separating out that $500, it's a cost of just over $3 per card, which is no
worse than likely catering costs. Even with the $500 it's just over $5 per
card. No solution other than the unusable "hand over a chunk of cash" option
has zero monetary overhead. We need to minimize the combined monetary and
convenience and legal-issues overheads, and this seems to me like a viable
option.
- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy@debconf.org
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