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Grex > Coop10 > #79: Budget Planning Meeting, Sunday 2/8 at 2:30pm | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 78 responses total. |
mary
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response 25 of 78:
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Feb 6 03:17 UTC 1998 |
I certainly hope we are extremely careful about degrading service
(reducing dial-in access and shifting users to slow and limited web
access) all the while looking for more donors.
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aruba
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response 26 of 78:
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Feb 6 03:23 UTC 1998 |
I agree with Mary 100%.
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valerie
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response 27 of 78:
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Feb 6 05:52 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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valerie
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response 28 of 78:
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Feb 6 06:08 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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scg
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response 29 of 78:
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Feb 6 06:36 UTC 1998 |
I've never seen Grex's ISDN connection saturated. When telnetting has been
slow, it's been because Grex is slow, not anything to do with the Net
connection. It's largely a perception thing, with people thinking that
becasue the old modem Net connection was slow, all Net connections are slow.
If the telnet queue is considered to be such a big problem, then we need to
do something about it. Compared to the tiny fees from long distance carriers
people have been complaining about, the amount of money we are wasting on
obsolete dial-in lines is huge. Perhaps we should be looking at doing
something like M-Net's system, where users from known local IP addresses are
given priority over users from IP addresses in other parts of the world. That
makes me quite uncomfortable, since it seems discriminatory, but if
discrimination towards local users is the justification for spending all that
money on the dial-up lines, having telnetd discriminate based on IP address
would be a continuation of the same thing.
Then again, I've never been convinced by the argument that local users need
to be treated so much better than users from other parts of the world, because
local users pay more money. It's largely been a chicken or egg situation,
where we consistently say that the local users are the important users and
spend lots of money on fixing things that inconvenience local users while
ignoring problems that primarily affect users from other places, and then
everybody acts surprised when it's primarily the local users who donate money.
Quite frankly, speaking as somebody who as donated a lot of money and time
to Grex but can't dial in easily, I'm getting quite sick of being grouped with
the non-local users and being told that telnet access is less important.
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valerie
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response 30 of 78:
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Feb 6 06:59 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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valerie
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response 31 of 78:
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Feb 6 06:59 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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valerie
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response 32 of 78:
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Feb 6 07:04 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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aruba
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response 33 of 78:
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Feb 6 07:53 UTC 1998 |
Valerie, the sales tax forms are due February 28th, and no, I haven't filled
them out yet. I mean to get to it real soon.
I'm frustrated that no one wants to suggest specific uses for our expected
$1300 surplus - no one has mentioned any since response 4. I guess I'm partly
to blame for bringing up the possibility of dropping dial-in lines. (For the
record, I would much rather see those lines full all the time than see us drop
them. But if they're almost never full, then maybe we have too many.)
Jan gave some ideas for hardware purchases in #2 - are these our top
priorities? How much money should we spend on advetising? Should we buy a
UPS?
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mary
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response 34 of 78:
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Feb 6 14:23 UTC 1998 |
Re: the $1300 Save every dime of it. It provides us with a little,
and I do consider it little) buffer.
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mary
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response 35 of 78:
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Feb 6 14:24 UTC 1998 |
Emergencies happen.
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danr
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response 36 of 78:
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Feb 6 14:35 UTC 1998 |
Mark, I certainly sympathize with the feelings you express in #24. It
seems to me I made very similar comments when I was treasurer. Also,
I'm sorry if some of my comments seem uninformed. I haven't been
reading coop lately, so I'm not up on all the budgetary matters.
I didn't mean to suggest earlier that we should just spend the money
willy-nillly. Certainly having a plan for hardware upgrades is a better
idea than just spending it on impulse buys.
Even so, any budget plan should take into account several different
things, including a contingency fund for emergencies, publicity
expenses, and perhaps increased revenue from a membership drive.
I'll try to bone up on things a little bit more and come to the meeting
Sunday.
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mary
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response 37 of 78:
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Feb 6 14:36 UTC 1998 |
scg, the telnet queue isn't "such a problem". It works for
a whole lot of people. But some are here for party and mail
and access to UNIX. And, as others have said, not all are
well connected through ISPs as you are.
I find it kind of scary how you don't see this.
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dpc
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response 38 of 78:
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Feb 6 16:24 UTC 1998 |
Yikes! According to #24, we paid $2,336.24 of "one-time expenses"
out of the General Fund in 1997. This is $194.71 per month. Plus,
Mark says that we actually *lost* $300 (not counting the store) in
1997. Plus, the just-posted financial report for January says
that we *lost* $635 in January.
People, we do *not* have a surplus. We will always have
one-time expenses, whether we use my estimate of $100/mo for the
rest of 1998 or the $194.71/mo which we spent in 1997.
As to what to do with the money we take in in 1998 over and
above our normal operating expenses, I have two suggestions:
1. Get the 670 up.
2. Don't spend on *anything* else, since if the recent past
is any indication, *all* of our cash will be eaten up in 1998.
Am I the only one who is beginning to feel like a Christian
Scientist with appendicitis?
Thanx for the kind words, Mark. We treasurers-of-Ann-Arbor-
nonprofit-conferencing-systems have to stick together. Shoulder
to shoulder, checkbooks in hand, striving for solvency...8-)
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aruba
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response 39 of 78:
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Feb 6 16:46 UTC 1998 |
<g> Well, perhaps "surplus" is the wrong word, but I can't think of a better
one to describe the $1300 which we expect to take in but which isn't already
committed to anything.
If you look at that list of "one-time expenses" we spent money on in 1997,
you'll see that nearly all of them are things we *chose* to pay for. (That
is, for the most part we weren't forced into any of those expenses. Unless
you count the fact that the ISDN installation cost a lot more than we
expected.) So I think your analysis is misleading, Dave, in that we don't
"expect" a certain amount of one-time expenses, we "decide" to have them.
Does that make sense?
On the other hand, of course, Mary is quite right that accidents happen, and
it wouldn't hurt to have a cushion. So maybe we should plan on just saving
the money.
What I *don't* want to do any more is have people say, at a board meeting,
"Oh, by the way, we need a new X45-gizmo; it'll cost about $300. Let's vote
to authorize it." At least, I don't want that to be our SOP for making large
purchases - if it's an emergency, that's a different story.
As I said in the January treasurer's report, we currently have about 4 months
of operating expenses in the bank.
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mta
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response 40 of 78:
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Feb 6 17:58 UTC 1998 |
Thank you, Mark for keeping us on track on this. I, too, read the numbers. I
didn't feel informed enough to comment, though.
My usual procedure in these matters is to listen to staff and accounting talk
it through and then try to find compromises that take all concerns into
account. I was sort of waiting for this discussion to get going and then I
planned to have more to say at the meeting where I hoped to get a better grasp
on the issues.
For the record, I'd like to see us have a 3 month cushion in the bank at all
times and make purchase decisions based on a) technological need and b) impact
on the remainder of the treasury after the cushion is subtracted.
I do feel that occasionally a need may justify dipping into the cushion -- but
a want doesn't.
So, if you subtract that 3 month cushion from the "working budget" how bad does
it look? Or had you already taken that into account?
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aruba
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response 41 of 78:
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Feb 6 20:40 UTC 1998 |
Since we already have 4 months worth of expenses in the bank, keeping that
doesn't affect our budgeting. Unless I misunderstand what you're asking.
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scg
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response 42 of 78:
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Feb 6 20:54 UTC 1998 |
I wish people would actually read what I said and think about it before
responding negatively to it.
I never said that everybody who is dialing in to Grex has Net access
elsewhere. I never suggested eliminating all the dial-ups. However, a lot
of our users who are using the dial-up lines could be telnetting in, and
don't have to be using the dial-up lines. If those people would start
telnetting in instead, we could both cut some dial-in lines, and possibly
improve our service to the "computer have-nots of Ann Arbor" who do need to
use the dial-up lines.
Valerie, you are one of the people who said telnetting in was too inconvenient
to subject our morally superior local users to it. I'm not sure why you're
now asking me what's inconvient about it. I was mainly assuming it must be,
since everybody keeps saying it is. If the problem is the queue, I've already
pointed out that if people feel so strongly that local users are superior and
need better access, it would be easy to have the telnetd exempt them from the
queue. We could just have it treat local ISPs the same way it treats things
like the terminal server that are on Grex's local network.
People here also need to acknowledge that it simply isn't true that all local
people can dial up easily. A lot has changed in terms on Internet access and
modem access since Grex was started. While there are still some people who
don't have and can't afford access to the Internet, there are also a lot of
people who do have Internet access but don't have easy dial-up access. I'm
getting extremely tired of being told over and over and over again that the
local users are the ones who contribute to Grex and are important, and that
I'm obviously not a local user. Should I just stop wasting my time here?
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valerie
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response 43 of 78:
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Feb 6 21:03 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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valerie
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response 44 of 78:
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Feb 6 21:03 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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aruba
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response 45 of 78:
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Feb 6 21:12 UTC 1998 |
Ok, how about this: what are some improvements to Grex that people would like
to see happen in the near future? Or in the far future? If we can answer
that, then maybe we can move to the next stage of planning.
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valerie
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response 46 of 78:
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Feb 6 21:17 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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valerie
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response 47 of 78:
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Feb 6 21:17 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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other
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response 48 of 78:
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Feb 7 00:48 UTC 1998 |
okay here's what i see:
Centrex Installation (11/12 of it) $806.04
ISDN Installation $634.00
ISDN Routers (with $795.00 from fund drive) $355.93
SIMMs for the new computer $248.00
New Computer (with $1,387.80 from fund drive) $81.80
X-10 CP290 Computer Interface $40.98
Renewal of P.O. Box $40.00
Advertising $37.50
Backup Tapes $28.29
Reservation of Shelter for Grex B-Day Party $24.00
grex.org domain name (with $80 from fund drive) $20.00
Renewal of assumed name "Grex" w/ State of Mich. $10.00
Corporation Info Update to State of Mich. $10.00
of the above, 5 items comprising roughly $1917 are one-time technological
upgrade expenses, and the rest (including SIMMs, we may need more)
comprise the remaining roughly $422. the latter portion includes annual
expenses we can fairly certainly rely on having. what then is the big scare?
can we seriously look forward to another net connection upgrade in 1998?
that was the biggest chunk of our one-time expenses this year.
i'd like to see a spare motherboard for the 670 as a priority expense, but
even with that, I don't see any rationale on the basis of these numbers for
dpc's chicken little approach. am i missing something?
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valerie
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response 49 of 78:
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Feb 7 01:46 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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