Refunding

Feb 14 18:02 UTC 1996

   A number of months ago, Grex received a donation from an unverified
user.  The donation was earmarked by the donor as being for a specific
purpose that Grex has yet to do, but certainly hasn't decided NOT to do. 
Now the donor has asked that the donated money be refunded to another Grex
user. 
   What do you think Grex should do?

response 2 of 57:

Feb 14 18:48 UTC 1996

Agreed.  If I had donated money to any organization for a specific
purpose, and it had not been used for that purpose, I'd be pretty
ticked off.

response 4 of 57:

Feb 14 22:24 UTC 1996

   I'm going to get blasted for this, but--

   We should not refund the money.

   Normally, I would mostly be in agreement with the above people,
except that in this case, we don't know who the person is.  This
was a donation from someone who we've talked to, but don't know
the identity of.  While we are likely to know in this case, we
can't be sure we're refunding the money according to the wishes
of the original donor.  I'm sorry, but thats the way I see it.
We simply don't know where the money came from, and we cannot
verify that the actual donors request is being honored.  I think
Cyberspace Communications needs a policy that says that future
anonymous donations are not refundable.

   There is also the issue of UPSs in general.  Staff hasn't
forgotten about it, I'll bet; I sure know that I haven't.  I've
seen Grex get hit twice now by power hits--this does a splendid
job of refreshing ones memory as to exactly why the concept of
a UPS is desired.

   Recently, we've been busy with other things.  Back when the
donation came in, we'd been talking to the Arbornet folks; they'd
received this large UPS, which they thought was truely huge but
was of no actual use to them.  We made a deal with them that we
were interested in it, provided that it worked and that we could
use it.  Unforunately, while physically large (and weighing an
incredible amount), it wasn't really large in capacity (about
enough to run Grex, but not future machines), but much worse,
didn't work.  No one at Arbornet turned it on, because they
didn't have the right kind of plug at their office to fire it
up.  No one on the Grex staff thought to ask that first, either.
We had a moving session where we got it into the Dungeon, only
to find out that it didn't work.  At a board meeting we decided
not to get it at all, and wait farther down the road for an
affordable (working) unit.

   This is not a dead issue to me, but rather something that
was put on the back burner.  We could go out this week and
get one, for around $500+, depending on just how much power
we need.  Since things like the Sun-4 have taken staff time we
haven't dealt with this issue lately.  Also since we have only
perhaps half the money, I did't think it makes sense to push
right now.

response 6 of 57:

Feb 15 02:46 UTC 1996

   Steve, the concept of returning money to an unknown source seems
like a very reasonable thing to do, according to my way of thinking.
As I've said before, if we *knew* who it was who donated the money,
then we'd know that this was legitimate--we could call/write them
and verify this.

   But we can't, in this case.  Grex supports the concept of anonymous
users, but it seems to me that there is an inheirant problem doing
something with a donation when you can't verify its source.

response 8 of 57:

Feb 15 07:38 UTC 1996

We run on the generousity of our users.  If one of them asks for the money
back, we should danged well give it back and make no excuses (not even
good ones).  It's essential to maintaining the faith of all our donors.

response 10 of 57:

Feb 15 14:26 UTC 1996

Nobody knows where to reach the person with that login ID.  The donation
arrived as cash in an envelope with no return address.  And a pressed flower.

response 12 of 57:

Feb 15 14:28 UTC 1996

   Jan, I maintain that returning money back to an unknown source
is an inheriantly risky thing to do.  Of course we run on the generousity
of our users.  We also however run on their trust in us.  Returning money
somewhere becuase an absolutely unvarifiable source tells us to is not
right.

   Rane, we can't return it to the ID in question.  That entity refuses
to give us any information about them.  They asked that the money be
given to another ID on Grex, whom we do know.

   My disagreement here is that I think we're doing a bad thing by
returning money donated from an anonymous user, one who we do not
know.  If the donation had come from a known source, you wouldn't be
hearing from me on this.  And that Steve (scg), is the difference I
see between reseting a password for someone and this--utter
untraceability and the fact that we're dealing in physical money.
(I'll also point out that if we have no connecting information between
a person requesting a password change and the supposed account, we
don't honor a pw change equest, either--the account has to expire).

response 14 of 57:

Feb 15 14:31 UTC 1996

I meant return it to the ID - not the person. That is, it is a donation
to Grex by that ID, and would provide x months of membership. What could
be fairer?

response 16 of 57:

Feb 15 15:53 UTC 1996

If I understand the situation correctly:

(1) We received a pledge of a donation from a particular id.
(2) We received the actual donation.
(3) We received a request for a refund from the same id, with
      instructions on how to deliver the refund.

If that's all correct, there's no question in my mind--we should
return the donation.

response 18 of 57:

Feb 15 17:13 UTC 1996

#16 sounds fair.  

I believe that verification needs ID to (right now) the treasurer.

response 20 of 57:

Feb 15 18:08 UTC 1996

  Return it, by all means!  If there were any real doubt about the
identity of the donor (at least their e-identity), I can see why it
would create problems.  But this is an unusual case, and we know with
reasonable certainty who donated it...I wouldn't say establish a
policy that all anonymous donations are handled this way, but this
isn't a hypothetical case, and I think #16 sums it up very well.

response 22 of 57:

Feb 15 19:56 UTC 1996

I'm afraid I have to disagree with you here, STeve.  It seems pretty
straightforward to me.  The person who made the donation and the person now
using the account may or may not be the same physical person, but we didn't
say anything about verifiability when we accepted the donation.  The person
who actually sent the money has now has quite a while to find out about the
request and refute it if it weren't so...that hasn't happened.

I say refund the money and add an agenda item to draft policy that for
security reasons anonymous dontation swill no longer be refundable.  

response 24 of 57:

Feb 15 20:34 UTC 1996

I don't think security needs to figure in the least in such a policy.
The real reason to discourage refunds of any sort is that refunds mean
that a certain % of grex's assets would have to be kept in reserve to
cover refunds, & a certain % of "scarce" trusted grex staff time would
have to be spent worrying about fraud & other nasty problems.  In
essence, grex would have to "play bank".  That is a reasonable activity
for a commercial profit-making business, where the expenses and overhead
can be reasonable charged against profits for the purpose of securing
customer goodwill.  That is not a reasonable activity for a not for
profit shoestring operation, where overhead necessarily counts against
customer goodwill, and our real goal is to spend that money as
efficiently and frugally as we can manage.  (There are, of course,
not-for-profits that operate most inefficiently, but they mostly exist
as the result of tax laws gone bad and border on the fradulent, to say
the least.)

I think this much should be clear & straight-forward.

What seems to me the real issue is, what do we do with funds that are
ear-marked with a particular project, if that project doesn't come to
fruitation in a reasonable timeframe, or worse yet, is abandoned?  We've
maded a promise to the user, in accepting that $, that at some point, it
will be spent on X, so we certainly have a problem: how do we manage
keeping & breaking such promises? I suspect many users would not mind if
the $ went to some other worthy project, so it would certainly be
desirable to find some way to use that $ instead of returning it to the
user.  At the same time, users may be less willing to donate if they
think there's much chance their hard-won cash is at all likely to be
spent on some complete different project.

Possibly, a reasonable thing to say is that the "board may elect to
discontinue abandoned projects, and reclaim money originally dedicated
to this project on some other equivalent project, or any other grex
purpose if no such project exists." It's nasty nuisance weasel-wording,
and it would obviously be strongly in the board's interest not to
reclaim money without very good reason.  But it's probably the only way
to fairly keep grex out of the banking business.