Board voting ends today, but...

[Eberhard Moenkeberg]

Hi,

On Thu, 18 Feb 2010, Daniel Stone wrote:
> 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.

I guess almost all members await that the board hires a lawyer to take the 
paypal money back plus his fee.


Viele Gruesse
Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke at gwdg.de, em at kki.org)

-- 
Eberhard Moenkeberg
Arbeitsgruppe IT-Infrastruktur
E-Mail: emoenke at gwdg.de      Tel.: +49 (0)551 201-1551
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