I just had a chance to read through the minutes of the last RA meeting http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1921 which did not have a quorum but DID have a great presentation from Sudane regarding CDS finances.
One topic that was discussed was "reserves." CDS currently holds about $5000 US in reserves, which makes us pretty healthy financially-speaking: that's just about five times our monthly expenses, and in the real world would be right on target. It allows us to deal with emergencies (few in SL of course), cover shortfalls in tier payments, and execute new projects without the trouble of finding outside financing. But it also raises some interesting questions:
Q1. Why does CDS not spend any of our surplus each month?
A1. I'd venture to say that the main reason we don't spend anything is that we don't have a process for authorizing payments to individuals who execute budgeted items. I seem to recall a half-hearted effort to create a budget at the beginning of this RA term, but as far as I know, none of the authorized projects have been executed, certainly not paid for. Exhibit A for this would be the Guided Tour which started in a very promising way and then vanished into the mists when payment for the software was requested and was not forthcoming. Jamie et al identified the problem clearly during the discussion of Sudane's presentation, and it's clear that we need to do something about this. I think I also agree with Jamie that establishing a process for authorizing payments to individuals is in the realm of the Executive, headed by the Chancellor, since it is the Chancellor who presents and holds responsibility for the budget. As a citizen I have no role in selecting the Chancellor, but I hope that the new RA will support candidates for Chancellor who have a clear commitment to getting this problem fixed.
Q2: How much of our surplus should we save each month (i.e. add to the reserve) and how much should we spend?
A2: Sudane proposed that 25% of our surplus each month should go to the reserve. That's a good start, but still an arbitrary number, so I got to thinking about what the basis should be for determining that. One idea that popped into my head was that as a community we could decide that a good goal would be to add one regular sim and one openspace sim to CDS each year. A regular sim we understand: it can (and should) be set up to pay for itself. But void sims might be another thing altogether. For instance, there's a thought floating around that CDS needs a mountain sim, and Bjerkel developed a physical model of where such an openspace sim might fit in the GMP and how it would look. That sim would be mostly "unusable" in terms of living space, but could add to the ambiance of the place. What if we decided that those void sims would be "public property" in most cases and budgeted to reserve enough of our surplus that we could build a void at least once a year and support it on an ongoing basis? For that we'd need $250 US plus $75 US per month for a total of about $1150, or about $95 per month. This is more than the 25% of surplus that Sudane proposed, but at 36% still pretty reasonable. Keep in mind that if we kept ALL of the openspace sims as "community property" something like this would eventually eliminate our surplus altogether, so we will probably want to find a way to collect tier on at least some of those openspaces. But the idea of buying community property is intriguing to me. At the very least if might finally give us that sandbox we've been talking about for so long, and at best it could make space for a wide variety of interesting projects that might not fit elsewhere.
That's my two cents for now. Will be interested to hear what others think. And will be VERY interested to hear the factions address this issue in their platforms and campaigns.
Cindy
