[Chapter-delegates] Services, staff considerations, and so forth (was Re: ISOC LIVE - the reports of its death are exaggerated, but..)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hello,

On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 08:06:19AM +0200, Hank Nussbacher via Chapter-delegates wrote:
>
>Let me try to rephrase: ISOC publicizes a yearly financial statement

Yes.


>My idea of a financial statement would be what RIPE publishes every year (for
>2022):

Well, that is also a financial statement.  As I said (and posted on this list) in response to a question from the UK England chapter, if the community wants the Internet Society to post dramatically more detailed financial information, that is a governance decision that needs to be made by the board (probably initially by the finance committee).  It is not something I can do myself.

I will note, as I did in that posting, that generation of some kinds of financial reports is, at the Internet Society, currently still more labour-intensive than I would like; and I would prefer to continue investing in the capabilities to do these things automatically than investing in people to make reports.

But regardless of the current actual capabilities (which are orders of magnitude better than thety were when I started), I think what information is published to the community and when is not something that I or anyone else on the staff gets to decide.  That is clearly a governance matter and I think you need to take it up with the board.

>https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/
>Internet-Society-2022-Form-990.pdf
>
>which provides a wealth of information - in a very undigested format.

The 990s are our tax filings, yes, and we post them once the audit is finished and they are filed.

>In the past, ISOC produced as Annual Review:
>
>https://www.internetsociety.org/about-internet-society/organization-reports/
>
>last of which was from 2014:
>
>https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/
>ISOCAnnualReport2014.pdf
>
>which did provide on the last 6 pages a very nice short financial review.

I think that financial review is substantially the same as the financial statements that we post now; but if you see something substantively missing in the current financial statements as compared to the past, it is possible that something got simplified away at some point that shouldn't have been.  If that is the case, we ought to ensure that it is in the statements (because I don't think that's beyond the existing policies of the board).

As for the reviews that were produced until 2014 (note that I didn't start in this job until 2018), we started producing this instead: https://www.internetsociety.org/impact-report/2022/.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan, President & CEO, Internet Society
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