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Re: PayPal



On Tue, Jan 01, 2002 at 08:01:26PM +0100, Chahine M. Hamila wrote:
> Salaam,
> Having been working in an NGO whose funding is essentially based on donations for
> more than 4 years now, I have some comments about transparency of funding, and its
> spending.
> Arabeyes don't owe anything to anyone, and don't have to make its expenses public.
> Let me make myself clear before you accuse me of advocating lack of transparency:)
> First, you have to seperate two kinds of people: those who allow Arabeyes to
> continue running or concretely help it, and those others who benefit from it or are
> just observers. Arabeyes definitely owes the first category transparency, reports
> about expenses and so on... For the second kind, such statements and reports are
> only done at Arabeyes' discretion and according to its interests. For example, it
> can be of interest to show Arabeyes records to potential donators. Arabeyes owes
> donators, developers, active translators and so on, some information. Arabeyes
> doesn't owe anything and might not want to disclose information to those who are
> just subscribing to mailing lists in order to lurk or start a flame war every once
> in a while. The reason is simple, by making all your records public 1) you divert
> attention to sensitive issues (where there is money there is always sensitivity)
> that are not necessarily of everyone's business 2) you add unecessary noise in the
> discussion, noise which most often comes from people who do not contribute one way
> or another, wasting time and energy 3) you limit your freedom of decision with no
> return in efficiency, credibility (people will *always* have something they don't
> like about the way you spend) or whatever else in exchange for that limitation
> 

No, you bring very good points. The level of transparency is an issue
that I would like to resolve before going public with it. I for one, agree
with you. However, we would like to at least display to the general public
the dollar amount of current contributions at least. The details of spendings
as you have pointed out, might generate undesirable noise and is best 
confined to members/contributors/etc. and not general observers. 

It was a good year for Arabeyes (2001) ;)
-- 
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| Mohammed Elzubeir    | Visit us at:                 |
|                      |  http://www.arabeyes.org/    |
| Arabeyes Project     | Homepage:                    |
| Unix the 'right' way |  http://fakkir.net/~elzubeir/|
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