Chapter Handbook: Managing Money

Managing money

What can money be spend on?

Chapter expenses should be use to the local chapter and be inline with the OWASP foundation goals, code of ethics and principles.

Common expenses include:

• Meeting venue rental.
• Refreshments for a meeting.
• Promotion of a meeting.
• Travel for speakers.

In case of doubt if an expense is inline with the OWASP principles, get advise from the Global Chapter Committee

How should expenses be authorized

A chapter should have a treasurer who is in charge of money. This person can be the leader. His/her name should be communicated to the Global Chapter Committee.

A chapter can have any procedure for authorizing expenses as long as it is also authorized by the treasurer and documented. As a documentation the treasurer must, in addition to any bookkeeping required by local authorities, keep a list of expenses made. This list should be made public, preferably on the Wiki, and if not possible, than provide it to the Global Chapter Committee on a quarterly basis.

Mailing list and Invites

Recruiting List Members

It is extremely important to grow the size of the list. This is the primary source from which people learn about meetings and the larger the list, the more successful the meetings. Needless to say, list members need not be OWASP paying members.

There are three primary methods to add members to the list:

Automatically registering attendees to an event to the list

While this may seem unorthodox at first, when done correctly this is the most effective way to enlist new members. Since meeting attendees are usually interested to learn about future meetings, this usually works fine. Just:

• Enlist all meeting attendees.
• Send an email to the meeting attendees summarizing the meetings
• In this e-mail, along side the usual thanks and the location of the presentations, inform that you enlisted attendees to the list, that the list is mostly just for meeting announcements and that anyone is free to contact you to be removed.
• Promptly remove who ever ask for it.

Offer to enlist whomever you meet and mention OWASP to

Since OWASP is (hopefully) something you are proud of doing, it usually pops up in professional conversations, whenever this happens, offer to register the person to the list to get notifications on future meetings.

Meeting invites

Even if initially sent through the list itself, meeting invites are often forwarded. Add to the invite itself reference to the mailing list.

Invites

Ask your speakers to send invites