Fundraising status is out of date.

[bbjimmy]

Fundraising 2014

Updated: March 30th

This is just one of many reasons Haiku appears to be a dead project on first glance.

This should be easy to fix. Haiku inc. must keep the bank account up to date. A simple script could update the website from this data.

[vooshy]

Donation amount was updated 4th September, Close ticket?

[bbjimmy]

Do we want to forget about this until the indicator is six months or more out of date again, or do we want to actually fix the issue? I think the ticket should remain open until the indicator is automaticly updated from the bank activity information for Haiku inc.

[vooshy]

Personally I don't think linking the donations indicator to bank activity is a safe option. AFAIK a member of Haiku, Inc updates the donation indicator manually by looking through the donations sent since last updated. This seems a more thorough and trusted route than a coding option linked to accounts.

[axeld]

bbjimmy: if it would be that easy, we would have done this years ago. Unfortunately, we need to get the information from various payment services, and for example, in case of Amazon payments, we have to manually connect each transaction with the E-mail address of the donator, as they don't include that data in the account statement.

Most of it is actually automated, thanks to Matt, but there are still some manual steps involved (like getting the statements in the first place).

[bbjimmy]

We seem to be talking apples and oranges here:

Apples:

Update the fundraising status bar on hailu-os.org when new deposits are made.

Oranges:

Update the Donation Analysis on the Haiku-inc website.

The Oranges would be nice, but the Apples atre what we need to fix.

[vooshy]

The fundraising status bar on haiku-os.org is actually hosted on haiku-inc.org - it is just linked to on the front page.

The work completed by Matt to have all of this working from different sources to show a graphical image on the site, when Matt is available, is actually updated quickly. He makes sure that every donator (that wants to be known) is given the opportunity to be displayed on the Public Sponsors page. The donation analysis displays the totals per month.

[bbjimmy]

OK, so the fundraising indicator needs to be de-coupled from the donation analysys, and then updated daily. This can be done from a script, querying the bank account if necesary to get the data once a day.

[umccullough]

I think there's an assumption here that all donations are deposited to the bank account... which is not true.

[luroh]

Hm, do banks in the U.S. let you query your account from a script? Besides the obvious security implications, there seems to be not only a bank account but an Amazon account, a Paypal account with donations in dollars and euros, a Flattr account, a Bitcoin address. GoodSearch seems to be sending out checks. I honestly can't see a script solving all of this securely and automatically.

[waddlesplash]

Indeed, I agree. I haven't seen any Inc members saying this is possible and info from multiple sources saying it isn't.

Resolving as fixed since the original problem described in the ticket was fixed.

[bbjimmy]

For haiku-inc to maintain its non-profit status all donations must go into the bank account. they may be collected in different ways, but they need to be accounted for, and the easiest way to do this id to deposit into a bank. then all diostributions are made by debits to this account.

by the way the donation indicator is now almost three weeks ouit of date. this is unacceptable.

I can't believe that a group of programmers able to create such a beautiful operating system can believe that this is just too hard to do.

The meter must be updated regularly ... as in once a day or once a week at the longest interval. This is necessary to make the project successful. People like winners, they bet on - read donate to - winners. The Donation indicator is a quick measure of our success, whether we are a winner or a loser. There is a correlation; the more rapidly the indicator is updated, the more rapidly the donations will flow in. look at the recent effort to help pay for travel expenses to help Jessica Hamilton get to the GsOC Reunion. That donation indicator was updated immediately, and the donations flowed in.

People want the feed-back. With positive feed-back the wallets are opened easier. Without feed-back, we look too much like a loser, and the wallets stay closed.

[umccullough]

Perhaps you can show me the IRS code that requires all funds to be processed through a single bank account. It would be unreasonable to require this as our funds are received and paid in multiple currencies, and requiring us to convert them to/from USD in all cases would very much be a waste of money when we can use Paypal as a secondary account for that purpose.

[axeld]

PayPal is a bank, too. In any case, bbjimmy -- are you volunteering here? :-)

I think doing the update once a month is totally reasonable unless it can be done automatically. It should be possible to automate this, of course, but it needs a pretty huge effort to get there.

[luroh]

Replying to axeld:

PayPal is a bank, too.

Yes, although not in the U.S.

[leavengood]

So I've been looking into sorting out the Haiku, Inc financials and automating it as much as possible.

Mostly our donations come in through PayPal. Currently we manually download a CSV file from PayPal, but the PayPal CSV file is pretty complicated. There are 41 fields, some of the transactions don't actually affect the balance which means they need to be ignored, we have multiple types of donations, different things we pay out, multiple currencies (at least USD and EUR but also more when we pay out expenses which need to be converted), occasional refunds, and probably other things I'm not thinking about.

Fortunately I think I've got a handle on it finally and I have some code which can take the PayPal CSV file and produce a file which is readable by the command-line accounting system ​Ledger. Everything seems to add up correctly in these Ledger files.

Of course while this is fine and dandy for financial reports or for occasionally updating the donation meter, having to manually download a CSV file is not a solution for having daily updates to the donations, which I agree would be nice to have.

Fortunately PayPal does have an ​API to download transaction data, and I will look into using that. My existing code could simply build a Ledger file from the API and then we could use that for more frequent donation meter updates (or we might not even need Ledger for this.)

Unfortunately as mentioned we also have other sources of donations, so a "complete" solution is a bit more complicated. I'm sure Amazon Payments has an API to download transactions but I haven't looked for it yet. But a "mostly accurate" meter that is updated more frequently is better than a "perfect" one updated once a month (or less.) It is not like it is a financial report, which I ensure are perfect to the penny.

Fortunately the bank isn't used much for donations besides the occasional check so I don't think it is an issue for this purpose.

Besides the issue in this bug about updating the donation meter we are terribly behind on our financials reports and that is pretty much all my fault. I think I'm finally over the hump in fixing all that though because of finally cracking the PayPal problem and I hope to get completely caught up within a week or two.

Once that is done I'll see about automating the donation meter as described here.

[bbjimmy]

axeld:

"bbjimmy -- are you volunteering here? :-)"

I would have, but once the ticket was closed it looked like nobody was interested in fixing this. Anyway, it seems that Ryan Leavengood will have it under control now.

[bbjimmy]

It is now more than 60 days since the last update.

[leavengood]

I've updated the meter today (January 13th.) I used my current donation meter code to get the amounts so far for January:

There are 29 donations
Total for USD: 656.08
Total for EUR: 648.33
Grand Total (at EUR to USD rate of 1.178200): 1419.94

So far there have not been any Amazon Payments donations. Someone mailed me a money order which I need to deposit, and then that can be added to the total.

With the above amount in hand I manually updated haiku-os.org and haiku-inc.org.

By the way, while the donation meters on the two sites look identical, they are separate pieces of code, so are updated separately. I intend to find a way to fix this, such as by using JavaScript from haiku-os.org to call into haiku-inc.org to get the information and then updating the meter "live." This is necessary since the sites are on totally different servers and service providers.

My next steps are to experiment with some code for the "live updating" and figure out the best way to currently handle the donations from Amazon and bank deposits. The former can eventually be automated and the latter can just be maintained by hand since bank deposits are much more rare.

The donation analysis will go on the back burner for a little bit (but hopefully not months.) Before I work on that I want to get the basics of this donation meter stuff done and also need to do the financial reports for 2014 and other years we are missing.

[waddlesplash]

Still an issue with the new site, of course.

[wesleym]

Can we get the Fundraising heading on the website home page updated and the the amount reset?

"Fundraising 2016", is one of the most prominent headings above the fold when you land on the home page and the reference to 2016 makes it feel out of date.

[pulkomandy]

And can we get reports for 2015 and 2016 donations? "pending automated processing" for two years doesn't get us anywhere. Time to replace the treasurer with someone who actually does accounting?

[wesleym]

Replying to wesleym:

Can we get the Fundraising heading on the website home page updated and the the amount reset?

PR opened: ​https://github.com/haiku/website/pull/28

[waddlesplash]

As of ​https://github.com/haiku/website/pull/229 we now update the donation meter based on a JSON file.

[taos]

It's back to August 2018 on the homepage, I'm sure it was already at December 2018 during January 2019...

[kallisti5]

I actually don't see this... I see December 2018 still. Refresh? Maybe check the developer window to see if something is failing?

[kallisti5]

I think there used to be a "default date" if reading the json document on our cdn failed... maybe the website had a default date I forgot to remove.

[kallisti5]

ah! yup.. ​https://github.com/haiku/website/blob/master/layouts/partials/fundraising.html#L58

[kallisti5]

I sync'ed the website donation tracker code up with the Inc. site donation tracker. Let me know if it's better (beyond not being updated since Dec 2018)

[taos]

It's back to December 2018 :-) (as long as the browser uses javascript)

Update: And now it shows February 2019 :-) :-)