Board voting ends today, but...

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 11:52:22PM +0100, Egbert Eich wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 09:45:07PM +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > As far as I can tell (and I've not looked hard, because I'd like to
> > escape the office early), XDS 2007 cost $US10k for the venue, around
> > $US24k for travel sponsorship (no joke), and something like $US5k lost
> > to PayPal (they decided we were scammers and took our money) as well as
> 
> This is actually interesting and it supports my feeling how finances
> are handled and why I have given up doing any accounting.
> 
> But maybe I'm wrong and I only have this feeling because things work
> differently in the EU than in the US where an organization is able to
> to pocket ones money by making false claims.

I'm pretty uncomfortable with the suggestion here.  No, wait, very
uncomfortable.  (Not to mention that if any misuse of funds _did_ go on
here, then it sucks to be me, because if that was the case, then I got
not a single cent from my complicity.)

> It's not as if X.Org didn't have a legal counsel - I would have expected 
> that with the help of this the issue with PayPal could have been resolved
> and the money been refunded.

No, not really.  If you read PayPal's T&Cs, it's mostly along the lines
of 'we're entitled to all your money if we feel like it', and it turns
out that they felt like it.  I'd hoped to use Google Checkout
originally, but had misread its T&Cs, which led me to believe that we
were not eligible to use it -- turns out this wasn't actually true.  So,
again, mea culpa for being daft enough to use PayPal in the first place.

http://www.paypalsucks.com and others have a litany of horror stories
about PayPal pocketing cash from accounts they thought may have been
vaguely kind of suspicious.

> > If you feel this is unacceptable and are looking to assign blame, the
> > mail archives back me up that the entire thing was entirely my idea, and
> > every single costing and proposal came from myself.
> 
> I don't think anyone is putting any blame on you as the organizer
> of the event.
> After all there was a justifiable reason for all the expenses and
> there is no point arguing now if things could have been done at lower
> costs.
> It is more the intransparency of things which create an uncomfortable
> feeling among some of the people here.

No argument that we should've been and should be vastly more
transparent.

Cheers,
Daniel
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