[Cadre-politics] status: better late than never.t

Sat Dec 16 23:09:58 EST 2006

WELCOME NEW VISTAs

LAST BOARD MEETING (November)
I lose day job.

ASKING FOR MONEY
asking for receipts

ERIC MARC ADUM
downtime database

THANKS
ubuntu doesn't suck

WELCOME NEW VISTAs

After 484 personal emails, 4 mass emailing, 2 paid advertisements, 13
applications, 5-6 phone calls, one missed plane and 6 days of 
interviews, we are pleased to welcome the new VISTAs.

	Jennifer Gibson
	Erich Jansen

Jennifer is an artist, has a degree from cmu.edu and after a year of
experience writing grants, still likes grant writing. She will create a 
fund-raising program with us.

Erich is the only person to complete all our tech tests this year. He's 
self taught and he's from Missouri. He'll be adding to our technical 
infrastructure and possibly working on some of our custom software. His
first job (with John) is to create training to reduce the time it takes
new tech people to get up to speed.

LAST BOARD MEETING (November)
The board meeting was short, so we could strategically plan.

Phil Reilly (medical Dr, Lawyer and business executive) and Dan Holin 
from Jericho Road [1] attended. Phil facilitated, Dan offered helpful 
opinions.

	[1] http://www.jerichoroadproject.org/

The minutes should soon be (hint, hint) on the board list archives, but 
as I understand them conclusions were:

	1) We are very fundable.
	2) Board members will write grants some Saturday morning.
  	3) We are in a relatively secure position.
	4) We need to devote more energy to fundraising.
	5) We'd like to have 2 paid staff people.

Jericho road provides management consulting, accounting, lawyers and 
other high end volunteers to non-profit organizations. Phil & Dan H have 
a lot of experience with non-profits. In their opinion, the number of 
organizations we serve, the type of service we provide, our use of 
volunteers and our low overhead are the elements of a great fundraising 
story.

I don't think they were just being nice.

They (Phil especially) vigorously applied the virtual spanking paddle to 
my virtual red butt.  The number of "please sir can I have another" 
moments was large enough for me to believe while Dan H and Phil are 
very, very helpful, they are not "nice" men.

For the record, spanking issues were: false modesty, mixing metaphors, 
using the word "sucks" too much, describing a few thousand dollars in 
the bank "enough for now" and taking on expensive projects like mvhub 
version 2.0 without the consulting the board or even knowing if we could 
cover costs.

I wasn't the only one spanked, there were 3 "so, does anyone on the 
board think they can do more?" moments. In reply there were two awkward 
silences and at one "I'm already fundraising for 3 other organizations." 
reply.

The end result was an agreement among some of the board members with 
fund-raising experience, to get together "some Saturday morning". Laura 
agreed to write grants if other people could point her to worthy 
targets. It's been 4 weeks since the board meeting and the Saturday 
hasn't been scheduled, but I remain hopeful.

It should be noted that (ignoring long establish non profit tradition), 
our board members minimum commitment [2] is to prepare for board 
meetings and (like all our volunteers) to show up, clean, sober and 
ready to work.

	[2] http://thecsl.org/go/board/#minimum

I'm grateful for the extra help we do receive and I'm looking forward to 
more help. I'm particularly looking forwarded to more fundraising 
mentoring. However, I'm not ruthless enough to change the rules of the 
game in the middle.

The other now obvious conclusion of the meeting was what we regarded as 
severe perils:

	1) Loss of me
	2) Loss of VISTAs
	3) Loss of University space.

...where when objectively viewed by outsiders, not as big a deal as we 
thought. The past predicts the future.

While I could get hit by a truck, that hasn't happened yet.

While we might have bad VISTAs, the CTCNet program might go under after 
8 years or Paul might get mad at us, the odds are in our favor.

While the university might give us the boot, four separate university 
departments would have to move about 12 Gig of stuff off our servers and 
John Wooding would have to take back his physical pat on the back.

I LOSE DAY JOB

I'm out of a job on January 01 2007

There is a limit to how long a non-student can work in a student job. 
The university and CS Dept should feel no shame for letting me go. I'm 
thankful for four years of reasonable pay and a very, very flexible 
schedule.

Fortunately, the Baby Boomer grant [3] and the tear-jerking but 
absolutely true to life cover letter [4], bring in enough money to pay 
me for next year. (assuming CSL board approval [5] )

	[3] http://thecsl.org/links/0001.pdf
	[4] http://thecsl.org/links/0002.pdf
	[5] 
http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/divinerightofkings/2006-December/000352.html

ASKING FOR MONEY

We are now, 501c3 tax exempt organization. At the last board meeting 
people said enough kind things about our work to make me blush. (Thanks 
Melissa for pointing that out to everyone, that I was in fact blushing.).

I can't claim we'll go under without your donations or that we are the 
best use of your money, but we sure will try to be worthy.

	http://thecsl.org/go/donate/

Of course every donation comes with the optional pleasure of my company 
and a complimentary beer or seltzer. Beer is covered through a 
matching-challenge type grant, no CSL funds will be used for it.

LAST BOARD MEETING (November)
I LOSE DAY JOB
ASKING FOR MONEY
ASKING FOR RECEIPTS

We plan to give everyone who donated this year a receipt for the IRS, 
but I (duh!!) didn't record snailmail addresses for everyone who donated.

It would save me a bit of embarrassment if people sent in your snailmail 
addresses without a personal reminder. Don't think of yourself as greedy 
  for the tax deduction, think of yourself as open to future appeals for 
money.

ERIC MARC ADUM

Eric Marc Adum is half of the duo that brought us http://mvhub.com

After being out of touch for a while he checked in this month.

He's got three semesters to go, is getting more As than Bs, had a
girlfriend for a while and has a market rate side job with
http://tensegritysystems.com

We presume to hope for the pleasure of his company at the February reunion.

DOWNTIME DATABASE
Kamala has finished release candidate 01 of version 01. She is (this is
a big surprise) waiting on me for review before going into production.

THANKS
Thanks to Phil Reilly and Dan Holin for helping the board do some good 
thinking.

Thanks to Charlotte Crockford for suggesting Dan and Phil come to our 
meeting.

Thanks to Melissa Carino, who convinced me to place the Craig's list ad, 
which brought us Jennifer Gibson.

Thanks to the night operator at the 200 market street data center. (She 
knows why)

Thanks to John Miller for his hard and relevant work. John's latest bit 
of quiet competence was figuring out that I'd ordered hard drives with a 
1 year warranty and replacing them with 5 year warrenty hard drives for 
$10 more.

Thanks to Chris Sacca who pointed out two years ago that we should write 
  more grants.

Thanks to everyone else. We get so much help that  unless I've recently 
stumbled over a contribution, it is easy for me to overlook it.

UBUNTU DOESN'T SUCK
In my last status report, I whined about how UBUNTU should spend less
time on marketing and more on tech. Well I was wrong. They are a full
disclosure group. Shortly after my message, I got the official, 
authorized UBUNTU WEEKLY NEWS with lots of links to very unfavorable [6] 
reviews of Edgy, the latest release of UBUNTU

[6] http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3291004537.html