Daniel, the points you bring up are hardly new. You are also mostly talking about keeping books, not auditing. The biggest problem with keeping books seems to be that it's a merciless and boring job, but one that needs to be done without fail (or else it's about as useful as not doing it at all). This is why I've argued in the past that we should not rely on volunteers to do this, but instead outsource it to a third party, and establish procedures to require trusted organisations to send their reports there regularly or get their trust revoked. Or would you be willing to invest all the time required to bring our books to status quo, such that it even makes sense for us to start keeping them properly? In my opinion, neither a balance sheet nor a P&L statement make any sense and would be far too difficult to create and maintain. We wouldn't even know what standard to us. IFRS? US-GAAP? Neither of those are particularly applicable to an organisation of our nature. I think we should stick to a simple ledger and publish a simplified, categorised income&expenditures list at regular intervals. If done sensibly in hledger, then you get a useful balance sheet for free. > e) just looking at the SPI balance sheet[4], the amount of money > that appears to be held in trust appears to be far higher than > actual expenditure. Yes. See https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2015/03/msg00020.html for my explanation. In short, I think we're too cautious to spend "substance" and merely scrape by each year with minimum effort. If we had a dependable cash flow, we could easily and would spend more money on sprints etc.. > Should the DPL delegate a team to specifically look after long term > investment of money that Debian doesn't have any immediate plans > for? IMHO no. > Simply keeping such large amounts of money in a bank deposit at > minimal interest rates appears comparable to using a default > password but making decisions about such money should be something > that is separate from the audit team. I disagree, especially given the low inflation levels. We also have nowhere near enough money to implement a sensibly balanced, conservative asset strategy, nor do we have a liquidity plan or long-term vision as to what to do with those funds. Anyway, a reasonable investment strategy for Debian with enough flexibility wouldn't get us more than 2–3% p.a. in interest. Even if you went ahead to invest 3/4 of our liquidity in such asset classes, we're talking about 7k p.a. in interest, minus the fees and time required for management. IMHO, that's not worth the effort, nor the discussions. I'd much rather see marketing efforts increase and us building a cash flow, then learning how to spend it, and then slowly reducing our substance to a more reasonable level, e.g. through (interest-free) lending of a large fraction of it to the FSConservancy, or so… -- .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@d.o> @martinkrafft : :' : proud Debian developer `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems # vim:tw=70
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