Re: [Debconf-team] Budget status - travel sponsorship
Brian Gupta dijo [Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 11:02:07PM -0400]:
> (...)
> I have some thoughts on how this could work on the accounting side,
> but the main idea would be to start a separate account for travel
> sponsorship, that is kept discrete from conference expenses, and take
> it from there. I'm *almost* thinking that travel sponsorship should be
> a new Debian Project that is separate from the conference itself, but
> understand that this would be problematic in the case that messaging
> to potential sponsors could get confusing. To make this work we have
> a relatively stable travel sponsorship fund that needs to be replenished
> year after year, with most of the variability being in the actual conference
> costs.
>
> Please understand that I understand that there is a good chance that
> this might not be a realistic undertaking, due to ongoing
> uncertainties in fund-raising, and is certainly not a short term
> option, but it is the best idea I could come up with.
To a certain degree, that's the way it worked this time, although
quite a bit by mere chance. We gathered (from our sponsors) enough
money to pay for the in-Nicaragua expenses. Up to some days ago, we
didn't really have enough money to grant travel sponsorship. Once
Richard (have I ever mentioned how thankful I am to his great work?)
managed to finish the budget for DebConf11 (from which we learnt we
had a surplus we could "claim"), an Stefano granted us up to an
additional US$10K (hoping not to use it).
So, yes, to a certain degree we are working the way you mention, at
least for DC12. Now, is this the best way? I don't really think so. If
we had gathered more money from our sponsors, I'd much rather be able
to use it for funding travel rather than needing to do the bureaucratc
foo to transfer it between funds. And correspondingly, were we not to
get some of our sponsors, we _were_ ready not to have travel
sponsorship at all, if we needed our DC11 surplus to pay for the
facilities, hotel and things.
Until DC10, DebConf operated for (but separated from) Debian. Starting
with a work session we held in NYC, we decided that DebConf was *part
of* Debian, and this in good part helped for our money issues.
We must keep our funds well administered, since the planning
stage. And yes, when planning a DebConf, we start by separating part
of our (still imaginary) budget for travel sponsorship. We should do a
reality check: How far was our projection from the real money we are
able to allocate? This year will be atypical for many reasons, not the
least of which is that *everything* (including the very venue we would
use) changed during the last few months.
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