[sudo-discuss] Long live the Exchequer

[Tommy York]

Hello everyone!

I'm Tommy, I love spreadsheets, organizational finances, cooperative
development and the required non-hierarchical leadership, and so on. Plenty
of other things too. I love questions, feedback, and extensive critiques of
things I say.

I've got some excheque'ing to catch up on, so I apologize if this email
isn't all fully formed and brimming with data and information.

If anyone missed the meeting last evening and would like to take a look at
what those fiscal solvency sheets look like right now, the URL for the
current version is here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlKk2X9KKqlFdFZJUy12ZUhDUmx2N3hUZldyejlXdFE&usp=sharing#gid=7
(credit
to Hol for the standing fund contribution logic on the "current" worksheet,
w00t do-ocracy). I'd happy to go over them with anyone who's interested.

These are totally, totally a work in progress, and right now really serve
as what a few of us were thinking for the next few months. After we get
hard numbers in there and go through the process once or twice, I think
logic will start to make a lot of sense. Right now, it's pretty much just a
test case.

Obviously, surpluses and defining the projects will help us fill out and
test various ways to implement the worksheet where members get to allocate
/ crowdfund various projects (currently worksheet 4, will be worksheet 3
soon).

If you have any ideas for the spreadsheets and want to play around with
them in a significantly altering way, Google Doc's offers a convenient
option on worksheets to copy them into other existing workbooks, allowing
for "fork" style code-editing (with few of other revision control features,
but I'm happy to do things by hand, for now...)

Proposals for discussions I heard recently and hope to have soon:
- Building in long-term predictions in some kind of concrete and useful way
- Documenting the spreadsheet with comments such that any new member can
quickly read and understand the budget spreadsheet and its logic... (I've
done these before, and will try to make a similar document.)
- Financially modeling expansion options, especially against membership
growth predictions (totally a "sensitivity analysis" kind of spreadsheet...
a favorite!)
- Assessing our banking options - credit unions?, etc - now that we've got
some momentum.
- Anything you'd like to suggest.

More to come.

The future is ours for the... making.

Happy hacking,
Tommy
-----------------
Thomas Riley York (杨德民) 510.926.0510
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tommyyork


On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Anthony Di Franco <di.franco at gmail.com>wrote:

> After a long period of semi-benign neglect of the weightier aspects of the
> Excheqing, I am happy to pass the function on to the eminently qualified
> Tommy York. In addition to having drafted a new set of fiscal solvency
> sheets for us which look like they will serve us very well, he brings
> experience running coop finances and a business degree to the task.
>
> This could not come at a better time, since the regular budget surpluses I
> mostly passively functioned over mean that we will very soon be
> crowdfunding sudo projects with our surplus income. My day job is now to
> write an accounting system for a crowdfunding and community currency
> platform with significant conceptual overlap with our own financial
> processes, and to the extent I am able contribute this sort of automation
> to what we do at sudo room, I will deeply appreciate the guidance and
> leadership of someone with a firm handle on the business issues at the core
> of things.
>
> As is our ancient sudo custom, after the obligatory series of polite, coy
> refusals by Tommy, the Excheqatorial sceptre was dropped and waved in the
> prescribed manner, and the information on the accounts was handed over, and
> the ritual of assumption is now complete.
>
> Welcome to the future, Tommy!
>
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