On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 11:55:55AM +0000, Philip Hands wrote: > > Debconf would not return the money to Debian. Debian would fund it by > > collecting the money from regular sponsors and also using surplus from > > previous events to smooth the cashflows for future events. E.g. Any > > surplus from .ch could potentially help a Debconf14 in a venue more > > like Debconf12 > > I think what you're doing here is turning the collection of sponsorship > into Somebody Else's Problem, thus ensuring that it won't get done. I concur. IIRC, there have been discussions into generalizing the DebConf sponsoring team, with the purpose of better reusing knowledge (e.g. contacts) from one year to another, and also putting those knowledge into use in case of peculiar needs of the Debian Project at large. But moving a significant part "to Debian" isn't going to solve anything. I'm also worried by the feeling of strict separation Daniel's mail gives in terms of what is DebConf within Debian. DebConf is just another Debian team. It only happens that it is a time that deals with a hell lot of money, on a yearly basis, when compared to other Debian activities. That is what requires special budget delegations and several of the processes and goals we have set up in recent years are meant to account for that. To mention only two of them: the goal of having an amortized 0-cost DebConf, and the budget approval process. In this specific case, I think reasoning in terms of strict DebConf / Debian separation is self-defeating. There is no need for DebConf representatives to contact sponsors saying "we have $0 but with your help…" as Daniel put it. DebConf representatives can easily contact sponsors and hand-wave Debian monetary resources, if that helps in convincing sponsors. That is consistent with the ineluctable truth that Debian *is* anyhow the "bank" for DebConf. If a DebConf edition goes bad, it is Debian who pays. No matter the tentative (!) budgets we will have approved for that year. Processes have been set up to reduce the chances that that happens and provide various supervision steps, but the bottom line remains the same. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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