Donation Indicator

I suppose it's Matt who does it usually, he's been busy for some time.
I forwarded to the mailing list.

I think this should be one of the top priorities right now to get fixed. If it was done manually by someone; I believe going forward it would be best if this process becomes automated and automatically updates the amount shown on the main page whenever someone donates.

First impressions are everything, and if someone (especially a potential developer) casually checks www.haiku-os.org every few weeks or so and sees that the donation amount has not changed; I believe they'd be less inclined to work on the project,thinking that it was dead.

And when it comes to users who generously donate; this looks really bad. It has been over 5 months since the "Fundraising 2014" amount has been updated. What could this mean? Has the person who kept track of donations stopped doing so? How do I know my money is going to Haiku and not some random person? I personally have only donated a nominal amount once, but have regularly used GoodSearch in order to raise some additional funds. I also use Amazon Smile and have set Haiku, Inc. as my NPO of choice. I'd like to see how much my "donations" have helped, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Also, if I was able to see that Haiku, Inc. has reached about $30k, I'd be more inclined to donate since the target goal is so close. Without knowing how close or how far we are from what Haiku needs to go forward is a huge hindrance; and I'm sure it has stopped some people in the past from donating and will continue to stop more people in the future if this problem isn't fixed soon.

The devs ton't seem to get the importance of the donation indicator:

Changed 44 hours ago by 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.
comment:4 Changed 20 hours ago by 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).

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 looser, and the wallets stay closed.

Come-on Haiku Devs, lets make haiku a winner and not a loser.

For once, those devs don't have to shoulder the blame...
The donations are managed by Haiku Inc. People interested in keeping things up-to-date should try offering their help to them. WRT stories for the front page: anyone can submit contents. No need to burden those devs with that...

Regards,
Humdinger

I'm sure Axel would be happy to leave the director chair to someone else... if there were some people applying for it. Fact is no one wants to handle these boring administrative tasks. The same applies for the website team. If you think you can write news about Haiku, and make the website feel more up to date, or if you think you can improve the website design, please contact our website team so they get you set up. This is not something that developers should be doing.

Sure Pulkomandy, I could write a news item for your frontpage that Haiku Inc. is looking for a new treasurer (to whom may I submit that)? I am sure someone would apply. I am not commenting on the news, or that Haiku's website is boring, just that if there's one thing that should be kept up to date, it is the financial standing of the organization and the responsibility and obligation to the donors to show that their money actually made the donation meter move.

I think it would be neat if someone could keep an eye what things are being updated, what new ports are in haikuports etc, and give a weekly/fortnightly/monthly update. There is interesting stuff happening all the time that doesnt get heard about.

Hey everyone,

I'm the current Treasurer of Haiku, Inc and I've been derelict in my duties for too long. I'm sorry about that, and I have my excuses like everyone else, but I won't bore you with those.

Fortunately I've been working on rectifying this in the past few weeks and since I'm a developer I've written some code to make creating our financial reports easier, so that quarterly reports are more doable.

But first I have to address the backlog we have of yearly financial reports.

The main challenge in all this has been PayPal: we get most of our donations that way, and their CSV file format is quite complicated, plus we accept donations in dollars and Euros, and we sometimes have to convert currencies when making payments, and all of this has to be accounted correctly to the cent.

I'm happy to say I've finally "cracked that nut" so I think it is all downhill from here.

In addition, I've written another piece of code which automates summarizing our donations so that the donation meter on the website will be automated and updated daily. Since most of our donations come in through PayPal my code uses the PayPal API to download our transaction information to create this total amount. Other forms of donation will be added as needed, but for now will probably be maintained by hand but pulled in by this automated system so the donation amount is correct. For example we had three donations from Amazon Payments in August, and only one in September. Nonetheless long term I would like to get it all automated, as long as we have APIs we can call.

I still think it would be fine for us to get a new Treasurer, assuming we can find someone trustworthy who can do the job, but my current work will benefit everyone, so I want to finish that up even if we get a new Treasurer. My goal is to make it as easy as possible to do the job, because I'm assuming I'll have to keep doing it!

- Ryan Leavengood

As of today, it is now fourty days since the last update.

Hi spinach!

I wouldn't say a week-old donate-o-meter should be cause for concern. We've had much bigger gaps... :)
Since it's apparently still done by hand, I suspect the meter isn't updated more than once a month. Let's hope the automating process will be successful soon.

Regards,
Humdinger

There's a date underneath the image, e.g. right now it says Updated: June 30th.

Two of the Haiku Inc. board have been replaced this month, so if you feel optimistic you could choose to imagine that signals huge improvements on the horizon.