Hello chairs and DPL,
to facilitate your job of approving the "base case" budget, please
allow me to provide a few bits of additional information:
1. I have committed a new version which introduces a column to the
overview showing e.g. average numbers of sponsored people;
2. Thanks to a new gold sponsor, I was able to increase the ratio
of sponsored people to 40%, which now means that 138 people are
sponsored on average throughout DebConf. This is higher than
any DebConf ever before. We are now 5k away from the best case
budget, which would allow us to take this ratio to 50%,¹ or
facilitate other expenses.²
3. Over the previous budget, there's been a mistake regarding the
conf dinner. Obviously, if we eat outside the venue, we save at
the venue. So the savings have now been reduced from the
projected conf dinner costs. The price for the conf dinner is
now 8.2k (excl. transport), which is lower than it was for dc14
or dc13.
4. While the conf dinner is already a very fine deal judging by
local standards and the type of event we are planning, we have
a few ideas to further reduce our financial commitment.
However, we'll only be able to play those cards during contract
negotiations, which have to happen next week and for which we
need an approved budget, or else we risk losing the good price.
For the record, the initial offer was 39€/person and we're down
to 28€/person already (excl. transport). I won't bet on it, but
I think we should be able to get to 25€/person or beyond by
making people who drink alcohol pay a small fee themselves
(e.g. 5€ for all wine/beer that night).
My request is thus to approve the budget and leave us the
freedom to further reduce this, freeing up cost for other uses.
5. The budget per se is *very* conservative and there will be
plenty of (other) ways to shift money e.g. to bursaries if we
find in two months that it'd be nice to be able to sponsor even
more people (than ever before). Here are some ideas:
- Unforeseen expenses: 8000 €
- Infrastructure budget: 5000 €, even though the venue is
fully equipped
- Video budget: 5000 €, but so far the only expense seems to
be transport from Paris and a few rentals
- Check-in costs: 1980 €, these cover credit card and money
handling costs by the youth hostel and can be trivially
shifted to attendees, at least the non-sponsored ones.
- Event insurance: 1500 €, which is not strictly necessary
and Debian could vouch for damages to the venue incurred
during the event
- Tax advisory: 1000 €, if we can't afford that and would
prefer more sponsored people, we could do this ourselves,
also with the help of PwC.
- Band and karaoke are obviously optional, but these are also
<1 % of the budget.
6. At the moment, exactly 50% people request sponsorship. If that
were to stay that way until reconfirmation, then we would need
approx. 10k to cover this. We do have three hot leads to
sponsors, and expect a few more prof/corp registrations, so we
expect to cover this. At the same time, sponsored registration
closes in a bit over a week, and so I expect this ratio to drop
by the time reconfirmations are due.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the current trend
(increasing the number of sponsored people over last year, as
communicated as a priority by you, the chairs) will cause us
having more money than we need allocated to bursaries, which
was also the case the last years, and which is not just good,
as I speculate in footnote 1.
7. So far, we have 0 money commitment from Debian in the budget
(excl. the kick-off meeting). Please compare this to the five
digit figures of the last years (which were returned).
8. Combining the outlook on additional sponsors, prof/corp
registrations, the very high ratio of sponsored people and the
conservative nature of the budget, I expect that we'll be
returning^W earning quite a bit of money to/for Debian, which
also isn't ideal as it's money given to us by sponsors for
DebConf.²
The above should hopefully make your decision a little bit easier.
Please approve the "base case" budget (now with 40% ratio for
sponsored people) so that we can engage in conf dinner negotiations,
and also confirm our exclusive use of the venue next month.
If this is not possible because you need to keep the option open to
increase the bursaries budget to X,¹ then I suggest Debian commit to
giving us X. Saying that Debian can't do this while we are still
planning such "optional" things as a conf dinner is IMHO not
acceptable and highly demotivational, compared to the last years and
especially in the light of our performance illustrated above, which
allows us to say that we are adequately funded 5 months before
DebConf, which I believe has never happened before.
I'd also really like to stop having to defend this budget against an
unknown group of "helpers" around the chairs.⁴ The budget has been
up for discussion for months and I had invited people multiple
times. It was obvious during last week's meeting that I had done my
homework and that the numbers matched, the budget was fair and
balanced, and there were no real changes required.
If there remain questions or uncertainties, please feel free to ask
me. If you feel like other people are better at budgeting, please
let them take over, or at least ask them to engage with me directly.
And if you think I am abusing the budget to make decisions as I like
them, then please point these out to me.
Footnotes:
¹) I can't help wonder if this — increasing the number of sponsored
people beyond previous numbers — is even desirable. It might set
wrong expectations for the future, it lowers the barrier for
bursaries (and we are not ready to offer free vacation to people),
and while the DebConf goals³ specify that food&accom are good use
for successful DebCamp participants, no such mention is made about
DebConf.
²) Assuming that we earn more money and manage best case, I'd hope
to be able to approach such subjects as fair-trade/organic t-shirts.
³) http://debconf.org/goals.shtml
⁴) Thanks to Tassia for all her patience in being an awesome liaison
between me and said group.
--
.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debconf.org> @martinkrafft
: :' : DebConf orga team
`. `'`
`- DebConf15: Heidelberg, Germany: http://debconf15.debconf.org
DebConf16: Cape Town: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16
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