Proposal: Jenkins funding page on CommunityBridge

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Oleg Nenashev

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Dec 26, 2019, 7:35:27 AM12/26/19
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Hi all,

I am working on the Jenkins donations page update at the moment (INFRA-2396), and I would like to propose some changes there so that we can have a funding source once SPI retires the Jenkins donations as a part of our transition to CDF. Jenkins funding helps us to run outreach programs and to cover some infrastructure costs, and as a board member I think it is really important to keep it running and, ideally, to facilitate funding and using the money in the project.

TL:DR: Let's use CommunityBridge as a SPI replacement to raise funds. It is maintained by Linux Foundation, and it is recommended for all projects within LF or sub-foundations like CDF. Examples: CHAOSSManjaro or KiCAD 

Background. Jenkins project operates thanks to contributions and sponsorship (infra, meetups, swag, etc, etc.). Historically we did not have high cash flows in the project, we mostly spend money on infra and on outreach programs (swag, travel grants, Outreachy and Community Bridge in 2019). Sponsorship covered the most of our "big" expenses (e.g. Azure, meetup.com, contributor summits, etc.), but there is a tendency to formalize such donations through CDF. Currently sponsorship through CDF is a lengthy process not suitable for small donations, and it would be great to have a simple process so that we can raise money to facilitate the changes in the project.

Current state
  • https://jenkins.io/donate/ documents the donations policy. 
    • This page has not been updated for a while, working on it 
    • This page basically designates donations to be consumed for Jenkins Infra, 
    • There is an explicit statement that "Your contribution is not used for paying personnel.". Arguably, this is what we do for Outreachy and CommunityBridge though stipend for outreach projects != salary
  • Jenkins uses SPI to accept donations. Soon SPI will no longer accept donations to Jenkins due as a part of the transition to CDF. The exact date is TBD, but the decision has been already made in Spring 2019 as communicated by Tracy Miranda
  • We also accept donations through ffis.de, but the status is unknown (WEBSITE-703 tracks the investigation). It is also not clear whether they have Jenkins money on their accounts and how to access them
  • CommunityBridge Funding site is enabled for mentorship donations only as a part of Governance Meeting decisions in July 2019). We used it to dry-run the JCasC Dev Tools project this year, and it works pretty well (except the SPI => LF transfer part which was the major obstacle for the mentee payments).
Suggested changes
  • Update "Your contribution is not used for paying personnel " to be explicit that the Jenkins project might use money to sponsor limited-term work on the project: outreach initiatives, addressing mission-critical topics (e.g. INFRA needs) or facilitating projects required for the Jenkins future' (e.g. JCasC, Cloud Native Jenkins, etc.) 
    • All such projects will need to be approved by the Governance meeting 
    • The payments should be limited to reasonable amounts so that it is "facilitating contributions / mentorship" but not a fully-paid job. E.g. GSoC stipends could be used as a reference
  • Enable CommunityBridge-based sponsorship for all available categories: Development, Marketing, Meetups, Bug Bounty, Travel and Documentation. We update documentation to mark it as a default donations way.
    • It will enable organization payments and also small monthly donations by individuals in the Patreon style. E.g. see CHAOSSManjaro or KiCAD
    • As a risk for this plan, Core Infrastructure Initiative certification is expected for projects on Community Bridge in long term. I got clarification from Linux Foundation that it is not a blocker at the moment. See INFRA-2396 for the context
    • CommunityBridge allows donations to be designated to particular areas so that donors can decide what they sponsor
    • In the future I would suggest to allow targeted sponsoring of big changes as outreach projects. It is way of the scope for this thread, so I will create a follow-up once I am ready 
  • Mark SPI-based donations as deprecated. Even if they continue to work, reimbursements from SPI and transferring money from SPI to Linux Foundation is a lengthy process due to the SPI activist-driven model. SPI helped the project A LOT, but the payments experience should improve since Linux Foundation has full-time employees responsible for payments
  • Investigate the status of ffis.de and update the documentation accordingly. Mark as deprecated in the case of doubt
This proposal does not include raising visibility of the donations page. But we can definitely do it once the new flow is set up and battle-tested.

If there is a consensus and approval at the next governance meeting, I will proceed by setting up a PoC and creating a JEP draft for funding.

Thanks for your time,
Oleg Nenashev


Mark Waite

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Dec 26, 2019, 9:13:04 AM12/26/19
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That sounds good to me.  I like the idea of the transition from SPI to CommunityBridge.

I think the Core Infrastructure Initiative is a good direction for the Jenkins project to consider in any case.  I'd like to be involved in efforts there.

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Thanks!
Mark Waite

Oleg Nenashev

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Dec 26, 2019, 10:01:30 AM12/26/19
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I think the Core Infrastructure Initiative is a good direction for the Jenkins project to consider in any case.  I'd like to be involved in efforts there.

I also agree that CII would be really helpful, it is in my plans for the Jenkins in 2020. I have started the CII certification checklist last week, and it is possible to find the current draft here. Unfortunately it is not trivial in all cases, especially we have some mis-alignment between Jenkins' security processes and CII requirements. Any suggestions w.r.t the wording and missing sections would be appreciated (some topics are in TODO)

BR, Oleg


On Thursday, December 26, 2019 at 3:13:04 PM UTC+1, Mark Waite wrote:
That sounds good to me.  I like the idea of the transition from SPI to CommunityBridge.

I think the Core Infrastructure Initiative is a good direction for the Jenkins project to consider in any case.  I'd like to be involved in efforts there.

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Thanks!
Mark Waite

Marky Jackson

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Dec 26, 2019, 10:24:38 AM12/26/19
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 I am a +1

On Dec 26, 2019, at 4:35 AM, Oleg Nenashev <o.v.ne...@gmail.com> wrote:


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William Hetherington

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Dec 26, 2019, 1:55:01 PM12/26/19
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This sounds like an excellent idea. +1

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Ullrich Hafner

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Dec 27, 2019, 5:47:21 AM12/27/19
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+1
I like the idea as well. 

Oleg Nenashev

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Jan 16, 2020, 10:19:23 AM1/16/20
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Beta testing of the new funding page was approved at the yesterday's Governance Meeting, thanks to all for the feedback!
I will get the agreements implemented and report back once the reference implementation is ready.


On Friday, December 27, 2019 at 11:47:21 AM UTC+1, Ullrich Hafner wrote:
+1
I like the idea as well. 
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Oleg Nenashev

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Jan 16, 2020, 10:19:45 AM1/16/20
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Beta testing of the new funding page was approved at the yesterday's Governance Meeting, thanks to all for the feedback!
I will get the agreements implemented and report back once the reference implementation is ready.


On Friday, December 27, 2019 at 11:47:21 AM UTC+1, Ullrich Hafner wrote:
+1
I like the idea as well. 
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Oleg Nenashev

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Jan 18, 2020, 2:09:19 PM1/18/20
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Hi all,

Just an update in this thread, I have set up the donations page prototype: https://funding.communitybridge.org/projects/jenkins
As discussed at the Advocacy&Outreach SIG meeting on Thursday, we will make additional review with CDF to ensure that CommunityBridge Funding is fine for the CDF projects.
I am pretty sure it will be OK since many CNCF projects are already represented on this Linux Foundation portal, but let's see.

So now we have two landings:
To whomever interested in mentorship, right now we can run mentorship programs with stipend and without one. There were some mentee applicants since Nov whom we could review (run a project there or invite to GSoC, for example). If you are interested, ping me in https://gitter.im/jenkinsci/advocacy-and-outreach-sig

Best regards,
Oleg Nenashev


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Marky Jackson

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Jan 18, 2020, 4:33:16 PM1/18/20
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I am interested in mentorship and will ping you offline 

On Jan 18, 2020, at 11:09 AM, Oleg Nenashev <o.v.ne...@gmail.com> wrote:


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Oleg Nenashev

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Apr 4, 2020, 4:10:13 PM4/4/20
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Status update here: I did not forget about this topic, and am still planning to submit the JEP and new PoC for ComunityBridge, it was just delayed due to other emergencies in my personal life and in the Jenkins project (and overall lack of time). I plan to work on that in parallel with helping the Core Release Automation project, but I cannot guarantee the exact delivery date.

BR, Oleg


On Saturday, January 18, 2020 at 10:33:16 PM UTC+1, Marky Jackson wrote:
I am interested in mentorship and will ping you offline 
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Oleg Nenashev

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Apr 4, 2020, 4:11:50 PM4/4/20
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Meanwhile, everybody is welcome to try out https://funding.communitybridge.org/projects/jenkins which is fully set up for evaluation/feedback purposes.

Oleg Nenashev

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Jun 4, 2020, 5:59:34 AM6/4/20
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JEP draft is ready for review: https://github.com/jenkinsci/jep/pull/286

Oleg Nenashev

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Jun 4, 2020, 6:27:14 AM6/4/20
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Also, overview and discussion at the yesterday's governance meeting: https://youtu.be/R80Rv6G-Oww?t=2806

Oleg Nenashev

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Jun 10, 2020, 11:39:21 AM6/10/20
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Thanks to everyone for the review, the JEP Draft is now published as JEP-15: https://github.com/jenkinsci/jep/tree/master/jep/15

I will go ahead and propose a change for jenkins.io/donate and Core components so that we could enable funding there. Also, I will add a topic to the next governance meeting so that we could approve the rollout of the Funding metadata in key Jenkins core components.

Any additional feedback would be appreciated!

BR

Oleg Nenashev

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Jun 17, 2020, 3:30:48 PM6/17/20
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Publishing the process as preview was approved at the governance meeting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Nr8QpqYgBiZjORplL_3Zkwys2qK1vEvK-NYyYa4rzg/edit#bookmark=id.dw06l1rks3oi
I will be rolling out the updates in Jenkins and Jenkins Infra repositories, but we won't enable it widely for every component within jenkinsci.

If you want to add a sponsor button to your repositories, please follow these guidelines: https://github.com/jenkinsci/jep/tree/master/jep/15#github-sponsor-buttons
It takes one minute to enable it.

Best regards,
Oleg

Oleg Nenashev

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May 25, 2021, 1:14:51 PM5/25/21
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Dear all,

Quick updates on LFX Crowdfunding and Treasury:
  • CommunityBridge Funding was renamed to LFX Crowdfunding. There were also some major UX improvements. https://lfx.linuxfoundation.org/tools/crowdfunding/
  • The project is still formally in preview. All other donation ways have been shut down during the previous iterations
  • Over 2020-2021 we have received 3165 USD of donations, including donations from individuals and companies. Thanks to all donors!
  • In January the Software in Public Interest Board voted for excluding the Jenkins project from the list of projects under its umbrella. It was expected after the transfer of the trademark to the Linux Foundation. As a project we are expected to move the Jenkins treasury out of SPI, and it raises priority of finalizing this story
  • I continued setting up the LFX Crowdfunding and its backend Expensify portal. The original goal was to add all board members to Expensify so that they could approve expense reports similarly to the SPI flow. I tried, but currently LFX Crowdfunding supports only one Expensify admin (me at the moment). The Linux Foundation plans to support multiple admins in the future, but no ETA
  • We will need to change the funding JEP to address the single Expensify maintainer. To do that, I suggest introducing the Treasurer Role as it was originally proposed by Martin d'Anjou before the 2019 elections.
My action items:
  • Update JEPs and docs to refer to the new naming and the experiences we've got. FTR https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/4378
  • Create a JEP for the Treasurer role. Document the treasury reporting flow and responsibilities/conditions there. Taking the current state, I'd guess I will need to take this role for now (volunteers are welcome!)
  • Ensure that the multi-admin Expensify feature request is officially filed on behalf of the Jenkins project
  • Report the SPI account summary. We have around 7k USD there, including general purpose funds and GSoC funds from JEP-8
  • Initiate the transfer of the Jenkins project funds from SPI to the LFX Crowdfunding. We did it in 2019 already for a 3000 USD transfer for Sladyn's CommunityBridge project. We can do it without a fee
I would appreciate any feedback w.r.t the plan, especially from the board members

Best regards,
Oleg Nenashev

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Oleg Nenashev

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May 30, 2021, 3:02:55 PM5/30/21
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Hi all!

Any feedback about the proposed plan and the treasurer role.
I would like to unblock it, because SPI is waiting for action from our side.

Best regards,
Oleg


Gavin Mogan

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May 30, 2021, 8:55:27 PM5/30/21
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Honestly I have no feedback about the plan. Seems reasonable to me.

As usual I have concerns with you taking on even more responsibilities, but lacking any other volunteers, especially since I know I'm so bad at numbers and money I shouldn't be treasurer, I don't see any other option than you taking the slot, but absolutely would love volunteers.

Gavin

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Oleg Nenashev

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May 31, 2021, 7:31:40 AM5/31/21
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Thanks to Gavin for bringing up the over-commitment concern. I can totally relate to that, and I would not like to take the role just to do treasury management single handedly. FTR the role of the treasurer includes multiple parts:
  • monitoring and reporting on budgets. This assignment can be load balanced between contributors, Treasurer "just" needs to ensure it happens. Taking our small cash flows, it won't take much time
  • helping others with doing donations/stipend payments and reimbursements through LFX. I have already figured out the process, can document. It rather requires patience and regular pings. Can be shared between contributors
  • Reviewing the expense reports that are expected to be already approved by the open governance process. Taking the recent response from the LFX Support team, it can be shared between governance board members
  • Signing off (aka rubber stamping) the expense report after the reviews. According to the LFX Support, it has to be an individual doing this assignment, but this individual does not have to be Oleg Nenashev
If other board members are willing to commit some time, we can balance most of the treasury responsibilities, For the particular Treasurer role we still need for the last bullet, I would like it to be held by a Jenkins Board member. Later we can formalize the role as Treasury Officer or so. Opinions?

Best regards,
Oleg

Oleg Nenashev

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Jun 1, 2021, 1:45:28 AM6/1/21
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Thanks to Ulli for the feedback and for offering help! Restored the dev list in CC.

Seems that the bureaucracy is starting to increase in several areas of Jenkins now, but maybe this is a very subjective view.  (But I am not a fan of creating a new complex process here.)
Any suggestions on reducing bureaucracy would be very welcome. Sorry if I push for having clear and public processes in some areas too much, happy to discuss it at the Governance meeting. Regarding funding, I do not think the process becomes more complex TBH...
  • We already approve most of the expenses at the governance meetings. Nothing changes there except this fact being documented somewhere
  • Tyler used to do budget summary reporting before. It is generally nice to do so to avoid situations like we had with ffis.de. Note that our earnings and spendings will become fully public once we move from SPI to LFX Crowdfunding. Everyone will be able to see our treasury state on https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/jenkins . So sending a summary to the dev list 1-2 times per year seems to be a low effort which is not even worth automation.
  • The main time sink would have been getting information about our regular spendings. Fortunately, Olivier has already aggregated this info for the Jenkins infrastructure. I am not aware about any other regular spendings, so we would just need
Any suggestions are welcome. For example, we could agree to not do budget reporting and just provide a link. Anyway I will try to make one for the current state. I started it a few months ago, a good opportunity to finish it finally.

Maybe it helps to make that clear with an example report.
So far we had only one expense report from Sladyn on CommunityBridge. THis would be a dated example. So we would need a new transaction to happen.

helping others with doing donations/stipend payments and reimbursements through LFX ... I have no idea what should be done here? We do not have stipends currently, or do we? What „others" do you mean?
Just doing Q&A for cases which are not documented well on the Jenkins or LFX Crowdfunding site. And ideally documenting missing cases so we have a good FAQ. Some related docs:
Signing off (aka rubber stamping) the expense report after the reviews...  What does that mean for me as an individual? What responsible do I have?  
 There are 2 steps:
  1. Do final check that the expense approval process was followed
  2. Click a few buttons in Expensify
Also that likely involves being a point of contact for the LFX Crowdfunding team, LF finance and reimbursement requesters if/when something goes wrong in payments.

Best regards,
Oleg Nenashev


On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 11:30 PM Ullrich Hafner <ullrich...@gmail.com> wrote:
The process in total looks good to me!

Seems that the bureaucracy is starting to increase in several areas of Jenkins now, but maybe this is a very subjective view. 

I can help you with getting the action items done. (But I am not a fan of creating a new complex process here.)

Am 31.05.2021 um 13:31 schrieb Oleg Nenashev <o.v.ne...@gmail.com>:

Thanks to Gavin for bringing up the over-commitment concern. I can totally relate to that, and I would not like to take the role just to do treasury management single handedly. FTR the role of the treasurer includes multiple parts:
  • monitoring and reporting on budgets. This assignment can be load balanced between contributors, Treasurer "just" needs to ensure it happens. Taking our small cash flows, it won't take much time
Yes, that looks like an action item that can be done by everybody, so I am happy to help here. 

  • helping others with doing donations/stipend payments and reimbursements through LFX. I have already figured out the process, can document. It rather requires patience and regular pings. Can be shared between contributors
I have no idea what should be done here? We do not have stipends currently, or do we? What „others" do you mean?

  • Reviewing the expense reports that are expected to be already approved by the open governance process. Taking the recent response from the LFX Support team, it can be shared between governance board members
Maybe it helps to make that clear with an example report.

  • Signing off (aka rubber stamping) the expense report after the reviews. According to the LFX Support, it has to be an individual doing this assignment, but this individual does not have to be Oleg Nenashev
What does that mean for me as an individual? What responsible do I have?  

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Ullrich Hafner

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Jun 1, 2021, 5:54:20 AM6/1/21
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Am 01.06.2021 um 07:45 schrieb Oleg Nenashev <o.v.ne...@gmail.com>:

Thanks to Ulli for the feedback and for offering help! Restored the dev list in CC.

Seems that the bureaucracy is starting to increase in several areas of Jenkins now, but maybe this is a very subjective view.  (But I am not a fan of creating a new complex process here.)
Any suggestions on reducing bureaucracy would be very welcome. Sorry if I push for having clear and public processes in some areas too much, happy to discuss it at the Governance meeting. Regarding funding, I do not think the process becomes more complex TBH...
  • We already approve most of the expenses at the governance meetings. Nothing changes there except this fact being documented somewhere
  • Tyler used to do budget summary reporting before. It is generally nice to do so to avoid situations like we had with ffis.de. Note that our earnings and spendings will become fully public once we move from SPI to LFX Crowdfunding. Everyone will be able to see our treasury state on https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/jenkins . So sending a summary to the dev list 1-2 times per year seems to be a low effort which is not even worth automation.
  • The main time sink would have been getting information about our regular spendings. Fortunately, Olivier has already aggregated this info for the Jenkins infrastructure. I am not aware about any other regular spendings, so we would just need
Any suggestions are welcome. For example, we could agree to not do budget reporting and just provide a link. Anyway I will try to make one for the current state. I started it a few months ago, a good opportunity to finish it finally.

Yes, that would be helpful to see how much work is involved.


Maybe it helps to make that clear with an example report.
So far we had only one expense report from Sladyn on CommunityBridge. THis would be a dated example. So we would need a new transaction to happen.


Ok, then we can do this once it is required. 

helping others with doing donations/stipend payments and reimbursements through LFX ... I have no idea what should be done here? We do not have stipends currently, or do we? What „others" do you mean?
Just doing Q&A for cases which are not documented well on the Jenkins or LFX Crowdfunding site. And ideally documenting missing cases so we have a good FAQ. Some related docs:
Signing off (aka rubber stamping) the expense report after the reviews...  What does that mean for me as an individual? What responsible do I have?  
 There are 2 steps:
  1. Do final check that the expense approval process was followed
  2. Click a few buttons in Expensify
Also that likely involves being a point of contact for the LFX Crowdfunding team, LF finance and reimbursement requesters if/when something goes wrong in payments.


Sorry, seems that I picked the wrong English term. What I meant: when I am signing an official document (about a financial topic) I am somehow liable (?) in a juristic way. What happens if the document I am signing contains errors, can somebody sue me as an individual? I do not want to have such a responsibility.  

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