On 01/24/13 14:19, Justin Lacko wrote:
The "official" policy of SkullSpace currently is that until we balance our budget
Even once we balance it via membership growth, we can't blow the new income that's keeping it balanced either -- we'll be looking at what to do with only the true surplus income and not the extra income that just filled the gap and stopped us from bleeding.
And we may very well want to save some of our initial surplus to cover past deficits so we can be in a better position of strength again. (as Jay points out, we're a micro economic entity -- not a stable state with the ability to sell bonds at negative interest rates like the USA can)
Plus, also on the micro thinking front, when member growth allows us, we may run to run and retain some surplus to be better positioned to cover future deficits if membership numbers and donation commitments wax and wane (as hackerspaces.org promises us) -- once the core pot is stronger, then we can think about spending new surplus revenue on non-essentials.
But it's all premature anyway as we can't conclude we're in surplus yet -- based on my conversation with Jay the other day about membership numbers, it sounds like a no.
, we can't spend on anything except the basics - such as rent and power. This is a fiscally-conservative policy.
I endorsed "the Justin plan" even though the regular member dues at $40, plus the commitments that people made, expected additional donations (e.g. bake sale like), and merch and junk sales were not going to be sufficient to cover rents and utils. That plan had us burning money throughout the duration of our lease and were only planning to not completely run out of money by end of lease (that was the point where we finally were able to go ahead).
That wasn't conservative, it was a bold risky move we took where we allowed for the possibility of hitting (almost) bottom at the end. It was such a big risk we took that I've worrying ever since I made the wrong endorsement -- I've worried about the strength of those commitments being a weak foundation and that we over estimated the non-commitment style donations, the merch sales, and the junk sales.
A conservative move would have been to acquire a smaller space (as other cities have) with rent and util costs in line with our membership revenues.
All this being said -- the commitments people made aren't contractual -- anyone who wants to withdraw from the commitments they previously made to fund the space's core costs of rent and utils can back away and do what they want. But, if enough people do that, we'll going to have to take a new look at our medium term (til end of lease) cash flow projections in light of the commitments that are still there and the new members we have picked up. We don't run to run out of money prior to the lease expiring (as will happen if the commitments that were made dry up)
As for looking at things from an investment perspective, I would suggest there are ways to invest in making space that aren't cash intensive, but labour intensive. It hasn't been as visible as I'd like, but I've actually put quite a bit of time into making the VM server a useful resource for example and hope to grow beyond the current 5 or so active users to more.
Coming soon* on that front, I'll be launching a "skullhost" service I've been working on, which is a shared web hosting service (not everyone needs a dedicated webserver VM), and producing some filmed presentations (to be uploaded online) showing how to use the libvirt/qemu-kvm hypervisor and how to use the Skullhost and MUMD services hosted on the vm server.
Mark *Soon meaning "when its ready", I'm working on a Debian style schedule now _______________________________________________ SkullSpace Discuss Mailing List Help: http://www.skullspace.ca/wiki/index.php/Mailing_List#Discuss Archive: https://groups.google.com/group/skullspace-discuss-archive/
