Record communities we serve even if we do not recover costs directly from them

[choldgraf]

For communities that are paying us for service, we have an easy way of keeping track of this relationship via a time-bounded contract that describes the service and the monthly cost of running it. This creates a record of this relationship, and helps us keep track of it over time. CS&S keeps track of all of their contract data, and continually updates it.

There are other communities that we serve but with whom we do not have a contract. Most of these are from before we set up our service contract, or are lumped together with collaboration hubs like CloudBank. We need a way to track these communities even if we are not invoicing them. This is important for considerations like:

• What % of all of our communities are we recovering costs from?
• For a "batch of communities" contract or grant, how many are we actually servicing? How does this map onto our expectations for the batch contract?
• Which communities have contracts that are about to end, and should we begin asking them to pay or shut down the service?

What do our current numbers look like?

As of 2023-03-31:

• We have roughly 11 active service contracts¹
• We are running roughly 50 community hubs²

Ways we could do this

I think the easiest (?) way we could do this is to define contracts for each community even if they don't pay us.

For any community we serve:

• We define a contract similar to any others.
• If we do not recover costs from them, we add a clause to the contract stating the full cost and saying it is discounted to 0%, along with a rationalization for why (e.g. "cost is covered by a parent contract", or "cost is waived due to inability to pay and alignment with mission").
• We ask CS&S to store the % cost recovery for each community so that we can track this.

This way, we would have a single source of truth for "all of the communities we currently serve" in the CS&S contracts database.

Footnotes

1. Based on this little AirTable interface that uses CS&S contracts data. ↩

2. Based on our JupyterHubs KPIs page. ↩