Re: [Debconf-team] Helping the budget get approved
Hello Martin,
> On 21 Mar 2015, at 09:50, martin f krafft <madduck@debconf.org> wrote:
>
> 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:
>
(…)
Note: in this mail there is nothing that influences the approval of actual budget, but I think some explanations are necessary to, hopefully, improve the -team “climate".
Tensions between local team (I speak historically) and global team about budget are common. Locals want the better conference ever, so “overspending”, the global usually want better finances [maybe to have money for “own” next bid]. I don’t think it is solvable, just the discussion and balance should be fair, in order to maintain the two very important souls of DebConf.
"Chairs have visions” (I don’t remember exactly where it come). Now their vision is: “priority on Debian Developers/Maintainers/Contributors/…”. I think it is understandable, so also if we don’t agree, it is their choice, that we should conform.
And it could be difficult to say to attendees: "no, we don’t sponsor you, dear valuable contributor, because we need free (as free beer) beer at conference dinner!” or “DPL: we need money because we spend them for free beer, and now we need to sponsor more people”.
Who will tell contributors such motivation?
And this was the substance of that discussion: how improbable would this scenario? [IMHO 120 is a good estimate (for usually budget), 150 is a really safe estimate and 170 seems too much improbable (but there were also a discussion about it), to get an idea of degree of improbability]
Conference dinner and day trip were always source of a lot of tension, and usually delay on budget approval. This year it come very early, because the strange requirement to sign contract very soon. But such discussion arrise also on other part: DebCamp, late travel sponsorship unlocked funds, very cheap food, …
So Martin, don’t take it personally, all previous accountant had the same problem. Maybe this year, because you are on the side of “No, No and again No. Don’t ever dare to thing about it” (usually answers from accountant, when we request few money), and the spending part. So things could feel worse, but I think all people really want a great DebConf, with great social event [and great talks])
Considering how much work you and chairs spent in budget, it seems that both of you are really caring about DebConf! Which is very nice! Thank you!
Note: we had also budget in November [DC13 needs some money in December], but it doesn’t solve the problem of “beers vs. contributors”. In fact until first registration deadline we could have still a small probability to have more people to sponsor as expected.
ciao
cate
[Really the solution would be to have a reserve fund for such situation, which should remain constant but for very unforeseen circumstances, but a previous vision were “DebConf balance should be 0 on long term”. I don’t know this is still actual]
>
> 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.
(…)
> ⁴) Thanks to Tassia for all her patience in being an awesome liaison
> between me and said group.
;-)
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