#602: Non-Profit Success Stories, Good and Bad Examples, Gotcha's: Asking
developers for examples and experiances.
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Reporter: p0g0 | Owner: mrenzmann
Type: task | Status: new
Priority: major | Milestone: MadWifi non-profit
Component: non-profit organization | Version: trunk
Resolution: | Keywords: non-profit
Patch_attached: 0 |
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Comment (by p0g0):
Just for balance- here are some Bad Examples that lay out the perversities
of non-profits.
I'll leave out most of the names, but I have been involved in each of
these outfits.
I wrote a grant, did the political legwork, and needed a 'fiscal manager'
that has 501(c)(3) US non-profit status to handle the $280,000 I got from
the feds. I signed up with a reasonably well reputed outfit- but they
didn't have any technical savvy at all. Over the course of 3 years, they
managed to screw up the books by about $50,000. Needing a fall guy, they
went after me even tho I had kept good books, knew where the money was and
wasn't, and had delivered the milestones and goals of the grant. The day
after the grant period ended, my fiscal partner took all of the hardware
and software, and shut down the project. A very ugly lesson in letting
anyone else run your affairs.
I gave a talk last summer to about 30 non-profits, it was part of an
conference to organize a meta-group of progressive organizations. When
asked to join in a group mailing, the big players all refused. They
refused to _ask_ their membership. These people had lost touch with what
they do and why folks join their organizations in the first place, but it
was the norm. Non-profits age poorly- the management begins to feel
possesion of the issues, that only they 'get it' and their members are
just sheep. In the worst cases, they compete effectively against the
younger agents, taking the scarce resources and willfully _not_ solving
the problem-if they solved it, they'd be out of a job.
There is an 'umbrella' non-profit near here that fell into a bad managment
regime for several years- they used their polical clout, reputation and
experiance to spawn a bunch of little non-profits, all competing with
existing ones. The umbrella outfit was urban, but propounded to serve the
rural. They took a whole lot of money from the genuine folks. It took a
big effort to change the governing board, and fire a bunch of people to
clean that mess up. If the means to elect the board had not been free and
open- that outfit would still be misbehaving.
So, in summary, there are good reasons to keep as much responsibility as
one can-fiscal managers can screw you big-time. Expect any long term
staff to lose vision. There are very important reasons to make the
controls respond to the will of the members.
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Ticket URL: <http://madwifi.org/ticket/602>
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Multiband Atheros Driver for Wireless Fidelity
