[Ambassadors] Re: Meeting Minutes of Fedora EMEA NPO Meeting

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-25 at 22:00 +0100, Robert Scheck wrote:
>> On Tue, 25 Mar 2008, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>>> Obviously I'm unfamiliar with German law, but there *are* packages that
>>> handle invoicing, balancing, etc. And people say the American
>>> legal system is hostile to open source...
>> Please be aware, that ERP/GnuCash etc. != NPO management software. Managing
>> regular memberships or similar things is not the goal the software you have
>> mentioned in your mails.
>>
>> A membership is a yearly fee, not a product. And if somebody has to add the
>> "membership product" to all of the members yearly, it isn't IMHO the target
>> audience - just to name an example.
> 
> Understood that you've been looking for a while for a workable solution.

Yes, we've scouted Google results, contacted some of the other parties 
in FOSS, and I've even requested my company to take this one up for a 
case-study and let new eployees/students, soon-to-be programmers, work 
on it. That's obviously merely scratching the surface but with the 
little amount of time that we had between the foundation meeting and the 
first board meeting (which included official registration), that's 
actually quite a lot of work in under 3 weeks with each of us having our 
own day-jobs.

Needless to say though you're right; we should take this up within our 
community and see if anyone has anything we might be able to use. Thomas 
Canniot already suggested Galette which we'll certainly be looking in 
to; Others might pop up with a few alternatives and like you suggested, 
we may need to add some more exposure to our quest for FOSS NPO 
Accounting Software. We'll most likely do that, because we (or do I need 
to say "I") will simply not commit to non-FOSS software no matter how 
much pressure there is, but at this point we will need something 
(whether it be a spreadsheet or SAP-like POS), and we will need to do it 
right, right-away. I'd rather do it right with something temporary, then 
do it wrong with something soon-to-be-sustainable.

Thanks for the suggestions[1] ;-)

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip

[1] Recommended blog post ;-)
http://blogs.fedoraunity.org/kanarip/looking-for-npo-accounting-software