Create a mechanism to describe funding amount in dollars

[jcn]

Right now, it is assumed that every grant is for US$1000, which is used for our calculation on the homepage, and when we discuss things externally. With the increased number of international chapters, as well as some other, unique situations (split grants where 2 grants each receive $500 in a given month, or the proposed kids chapter which will be granting $100 per month), it is important to start capturing exactly how much is being granted by each project.

My proposal is to do a couple of things:

• Give each chapter a default currency and amount in that currency (most US chapters would be dollars and 1,000, but a European chapter might be Euros and 1,000)
• Every grant will store the currency and amount that it provided, as well as the equivalent amount in dollars (for historical and calculation purposes)
• When the grant is marked as a winner, this field will be populated using the most current exchange rate into dollars

I know that this is a fairly US-centric approach, but short of storing all of the exchange rates every time we make a grant, this seems like a reasonable way of capturing that information. I am open to discussion though.

[JoelPomerantz]

I know it's harder and takes more space but I think it would be inspiring for a home page visitor to see an asterisk on the total dollar number. Then they can scoll down to see a list in not-so-fine print saying:

Actually it was
416,000 US dollars
200 Mongolian tögrög
21,000 UK pounds
1200 Qatari riyals
900 Swiss francs
etc.