Re: committed sponsorships, payments and balancing books of debconf events
Hello,
I am not 100% certain of all replies here, so if someone thinks I
might be wrong, please correct me.
2018-04-06 9:25 GMT+02:00 shirish शिरीष <shirishag75@gmail.com>:
> I thoroughly admit/confess about debconf event planning works and
> thought this probably would be the most appropriate way to understand
> how things work and have it recorded for posterity and historical
> reference.
>
> It is purely an academic pursuit at the moment.
>
> I had a look at
>
> https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Accounting
>
> https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Budgeting
>
> https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Fundraising
>
> https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/TravelSponsorship
>
> https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/YearlyBudget
>
> and last but not the least https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/MoneyFlow
This is excellent, I did not even notice those pages before.
> Sadly, it seems most of the content is somewhat outdated but dunno the
> reasons for that, the usual suspect might be simply lack of time from
> volunteers.
Indeed, I think the way forward is someone to generalize them, those
seem to have been created for past DebConfs many years ago.
> The reason I ask is it is not articulated anywhere formally as how the
> whole the budgeting thing works.
>
> Observing from the various interactions on various mailing lists and
> IRC, this is how it seems to work -
>
> 1. Advertise to potential pool of advertisers to support debconf and
> how they can have value out of that relationship. Many are long-time
> supporters so that latter part is not shared but implied.
+1
> 2. Sponsors who reply in the affirmative are given invoices. The
> invoices are similar to IOU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOU but in a
> formal sense.
Well, invoices are generated depending on trusted organization invoice
format. Usually SPI is used for most of the cases (USD), however other
TO such Debian France (EUR) are used. Then the local organization,
this year would be OCF.tw (NTD), we also have Debian CH (CHF)
> 3. From the sponsorship money, the debconf-team gets an informal
> budget from which all expenses, i.e. travel, accommodation
> sponsorships (probably a big slice of the budget), catering, venue and
> catering for last dinner night are added in. The idea is usually to
> have a surplus so that some money is kept for a rainy day. If there is
> a short in the budget, the DPL is requested to either make the short
> good from debian's budget although at times a late surge in
> sponsorship may reduce or cancel that as well. There is also a
> possibility to reduce the travel and accommodation bursaries as well.
Usually DPL needs to approve a budget for DebConf, then fundraising
attempts to do all posible to reach the goal, if that's not possible,
DPL needs to be requested for extra surplus.
> 4. After debconf finishes, reports are shared with the sponsors about
> both the travel kit as well as how their names were there on the
> various banners, t-shirts etc. depending upon the sponsorship tier
> they were in.
Well, yeah, a final report is created and shared with sponsors.
> 5. Sponsors are pinged to get the invoices good.
>
> 6. After money is received, money is paid to those who were promised
> travel sponsorships within the budget prescribed and who had
> submitted the documents asked.
Debian funds might be taken, so note, there is no dependencies on
sponsors paying their bits, but it is preferable, some income has been
made before hand.
> 7. Depending upon when the above is all done, all receipts are done,
> payments done and auditors auditing the account the debconf final
> report is presented as matter of public archives.
Well, yeah, in an ideal world that'd probably be true.
> Am I correct in assuming the above flow . I know there are lot more
> details and about a dozen or more mini sub-steps in what I have
> shared.
For a start is not too bad, it'd need some polishing and review by
DebConf chair, also I am not sure if policies are strictly set on that
regard.
> If the above simplified explanation is true, where should I put up the
> same, on what wiki page so that's its found with a preferably a link
> to the discussion topic for future debconf planners.
>
> Look forward to know more.
This is great information, it would be great to standarize on general
workflows in the wiki. Thanks very much for such interest.
Regarding the place, how about creating a
https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf/DebConf page and start adding
content there and start moving to subpages stuff that grows?
There are also plans to move wiki at some point to some where I do not
know, so maybe we end up having to redo some pages, maybe it is more
suitable to have a official immutable documents for such things, for
that I would suggest to write it in markdown syntax, then use
conversion tool of preference to generate a website.
> --
> Regards,
> Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
> My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
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>
Cheers
--
Héctor Orón -.. . -... .. .- -. -.. . ...- . .-.. --- .--. . .-.
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