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

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

Dear Andrew,

thank you for your kind responses. Please find my responses inline:

On 12/03/2024 12:10, Andrew Sullivan via Chapter-delegates wrote:
> 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.

We are not asking for analysis. Quite the contrary, we are asking for 
more transparency on already existing report. We assume that they exist 
because any firm would produce abbreviated accounts starting from 
detailed accounts. As abbreviated figures are currently published, we 
assume that detailed account exist. I would be very concerned if details 
of every project budget in the Internet Society did not exist. That 
would be alarming.


>
> 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.

Thank you - that is exactly what we shall do.

[...]

>> 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).

If you compare the above with the financial statements at 
https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2022-Financial-Statements.pdf 
you'll see that one is roughly 5-6 pages long and the other 3. The 2014 
report is a lot more detailed, especially the table on page 43 which 
provides details of every source or revenue and the major sources of 
expenses. I would have expected the costs in rolling out the "new AMS 
based on SalesForce" to be listed there and to also show the reduction 
of USD 63,600 to be reflected in as a decrease in the the $6M budget for 
Strategic Communications & Stakeholder Relations.
But in another email you mentioned you were not ready to release such 
data, so you might wish to reconsider that.

>
> 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/.

Thank you, that is helpful.
Kindest regards,

Olivier
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