A few thoughts from the treasurer as Roktober draws to a close. I hope I haven’t posted this too late to have a positive impact on our overall fund drive. We are way off our goal for this year and I am not sure if that is the result of the uncertainty in the economy or people are just sick of us

We have seen a huge fall-off in donations from the US, and I wonder whether it is because we expressed the goal in Euros and somehow offended our friends outside of Europe. Last year, because of the strength of the Euro against the other world currencies, we made a decision to express our goal in Euros because many of our expenses are in Euros. This is not because we are a Euro centric project. In fact, we have just as many US based devs as Europe, and we also have people in Australia, China and South America. We need support from around the world, not just Europe, so if we somehow put you off, or you think your currency isn’t as valuable, please reconsider.

Speaking of which, we are planning on giving two prizes this year so I think it is fair to give an entry for local currency, because even though a Euro buys more Canadian or US Dollars, 10 Dollars buys the same amount of bread in North American as 10 Euros does in Europe. So if you live outside of Europe and 10 Euros is a lot more than 10 Dollars, fear not, you will get an entry in our giveaway based on local currencies.

Towards the end of last year we spent €2000 to send 12 people to aKademy, all of whom but one was approved by KDE e.V. for reimbursement. So the real cost of those people attending was closer to €10,000. Thankfully, KDE is a great, well-run organization and can make attendance possible at all. We are all really happy that we can fund the remaining 20% as for some of our student contributors, that could have meant the difference between attending and not attending.

We spent about €1500 on technical and administrative items like server hosting, domain administration, develop resources (books) and hardware.

In addition to aKademy, we spent over €3500 attending free software conferences around the world including CeBIT, Fosdem and LinuxTag in Berlin. We had devs giving presentations in Taiwan (which led to Amarok being included on the eeePC) and Austin, Texas in the US. In addition to giving presentations, we attended many educational seminars and spent time on promotional activities for free software and KDE in general and Amarok in particular. The money was spent on travel, lodging, registration fees, booth rentals, and promotional items.

In a moment of undisciplined emotional weakness, we bought each developer/contributor team member two t-shirts. A small thank you for the large amounts of time put into the project by volunteers who are doing this for fun, not profit.

I know that Paypal is an issue for many people, so if you would like to contribute but will not use Paypal, please send an email to greg@getamarok.com for instructions on how to send a check or make a bank transfer. Anybody that has already contacted me about this does not need to send another message.

Thanks again for all of your support.