[FanDeAliFee]

This post has nothing to do with buying hypothetical shares in Wisteria Song., but pertains to the related topic of auditing the collection of money from a group of people.

Dave faced this challenge when taking orders for signed CDs in the spring and it also was implicitly present in the fundraising adventures with which I was involved.

This spring a new firm named WePay started providing service. The New York Times writes: The WePay platform allows users to set up accounts for groups of people to manage and collect funds. For example, a group account could be used to raise funds for a charity or collect rent amongst roommates.

WePay provides an auditing function, but not a treasurer function. The funds collected for a particular purpose are in the complete spending control of the account administrator, (i.e. treasurer), whom all the cooperating parties must trust. But it seems to provide an easy way to reliably verify that contributors have been paid and how much, et cetera.

WePay might be used to collect money which compensates someone who is sent to a musical star's concert as the representative of a fan club. The donors could be fan club members, one of whom is chosen by the account administrator at random to serve as said representative. In this way, a club of fans, none of whom could individually afford to attend the concert, could at least manage to send one of their number, who could make a report as well as have a good time.

It is always touchy trusting someone with money, especially a party with a short track record! I myself have never used WePay. A simple way to become familiar with it might be for a group of AAm members to use it to collect $1 contributions to buy the teddy bear in Ben's AAm store as a welcome gift for a new AAm member.

I invite people who know of similar services to bring them to our attention.