[Debconf-team] le camp budget...
Hi,
This email is to state my thoughts on the proposed Le Camp
reservation, more directly. I am looking over this with a critical
eye, trying to ensure solvency. Thus, I am not relying on faith so
much here, but provide "global team / debian oversight". It rightly
seems more critical than other analyzes, but that is the point. I
expect my criticism to be criticized to produce a new recommendation
soon.
First off, I went off of a Le Camp budget found in
debconf-team/dc13/finance/budget_dc13_draft1_lecamp.pdf . I have
tried to follow list discussions, too.
Since I can't seem to find an editable version of the budget
spreadsheet in any repo (!), I made my own. This also allowed me to
play with the numbers, and better separate *required* costs from
optional ones. I have concentrated on required costs here, lots of
small expenses aren't important now. Regardless, we can assume at
least +/- 20 kCHF uncertainty in both incomes and expenses now, it's
not worth worrying about small things. It is available in svn at
http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debconf-data/dc13/accounting/budget-darst.ods?view=co
Here is my summary of the biggest things. In brackets is a comparison
with the local team budget. I can't check the math of the localteam
budget, since I don't seem to have the spreadsheet anymore...
Basic:
DebCamp attendees: 100
DebConf attendees: 300
Person-days: 3100
Expenses:
Accommodation 73200 [I can't see how to get as low as the
spreadsheet while including the minimum cost of exclusive debcamp]
Food 87700 [My number excludes first/last days, day trip
day; doesn't reduce other days since le camp is not budging here.]
Travel sponsorship 0 [See below]
Other 30000 [Giving up most everything non-essential, this
could be lowered to half or so.]
Total expenses:190000 [my spreadsheet says more like 245000 for
everything we want...]
Incomes, on an optimistic view:
Sponsors 85000 [Using secure estimates of # b/s/g/p sponsors.
Their addition said 105000, so I am missing 20 kCHF somewhere]
[A more liberal estimate put this at 125 kCHF.
But we should see evidence of much more
successful fundraising before using this larger
number in the budget. The figure here is
already a lot more than was raised in the last
few years.]
Attendee fees: 22000 [In line with previous years. Local team
estimates assumes 50% more 50% more profs than the last two years,
unrealistic number of corps, and fees above what are normally
charged. #prof has previously been relatively constant, because these
people are more likely to be be able to attend than those who pay
themselves and go during holidays; this also overestimates # corp of
the last few years. We also know that some previous prof/corp
attendees won't come to Le Camp, so the numbers could be lower than in
the past.]
Donations 5000
Total incomes: 112000
[A sponsorship figure of +40 kCHF greater, as seen on IRC yesterday,
includes 40 kCHF of basically "guarantees" "to be repaid once all
costs are covered (excluding travel sponsorship). However, since this
is supposed to be repaid, it isn't really "sponsorship", or income, it
basically helps solve a short-term cash flow problem. I don't include
it here. If we use that, it means there can be no travel sponsorship]
So, thus far on a rather optimistic view and leaving out anything we
could possibly do without, this is a minimum *deficit* of 78 kCHF even
if we skip travel sponsorship etc. That is a lot. With 360
attendees, deficit goes up by 30kCHF or so.
Discussion:
- I don't include travel sponsorship above. With the planned 30
-kCHF. With that, the minimum deficit increases to 108 kCHF.
- (idea 1) There was a proposal to reduce costs by shortening. In
-order to do that, we can not sign the current contract since it
-precludes shortening... And Le Camp asserted that this would
-increase each cost per item.
- (idea 2) Reduce cost by charging attendees for food. This wasn't
-seen too positively. If attendees eat their own food, we will still
-have, we will still have to pay le camp [as part of their contract],
-so at best this still leaves us with cashflow problems. At worst,
-this becomes a mandatory 40 CHF/day registration fee.
- (idea 3) Bed upselling / reducing accom cost. Bed upselling is part
of already there as a separate income. Local team had assumed 6.5
kCHF. Historically, this has been part of "professional". We don't
know how popular this would be.
- (idea 4) Reduce accom cost. (?)
- "Bar profit": previous pdf assumes 5 kCHF. Not sure what the basis
for that is...
- This is using the cheaper lunch option [cold buffet, every day],
saving 15 kCHF or so.
- With my calculations, reducing to 50 DebCamp attendees and 150
DebConf attendees (but somehow keeping the same number prof/corp
attendees) about balances thisgs (5 kCHF surplus). This means, with
optimistic fundraising, we can provide sufficient travel sponsorship.
However, people have hoped that this would be a big DebConf.
- If we have on the order of 200 professional attendees (conf+camp
prof attendee counts as two), that would also get the budget very
close to balanced. Remember: this assumes a professional fee greater
more than the standard raw cost per attendee-week, and quite a bit
more than the past two years.
- Even assuming 125000 sponsorship income (optimistic estimate) leaves
us with a major deficit when included travel sponsorship.
To Do / Recommendation:
I have put this budget spreadsheet in svn. I encourage peer review
and people to send me updates. People can look it over and correct
any assumptions I have made, and I will re-issue and updated one, with
updated discussion.
We don't have to sign the Le Camp contract for ~ 4 weeks, according to
latest IRC estimates. This gives us time to see how well the
fundraising estimates work out. If it goes much better than normal
and we find a lot of first-time sponsors, we can see again.
Otherwise, we need to find another plan.
I don't see room for travel sponsorship as-is now. "anonymous 40
kCHF" money would go to filling budget deficit, any additional
sponsorship would offset that but not contribute to travel sponsorship
(since anonymous money is decreased). It would take more than 108
kCHF extra fundraising to provide 30 kCHF travel sponsorship.
My recommendation basically goes with what I said in
[🔎] 20121022132047.GT513@pyke.zgib.net -- I firmly recommend *not* to sign
the contract yet. A contract at this point would remove our usual
ability to cut significant costs later, so DebConf13 would generate a
hard deficit, as opposed to a soft one in past years that we solved by
aggressive cost cutting close to the conference. Sort of like we had
thought earlier in the year, I think we shouldn't sign a contract
until we agree on how to fund it... and we can't definitely say we are
there yet.
Thanks,
- Richard
--
| Richard Darst - rkd@ - pyke: up 33 days, 18:04
| http://rkd.zgib.net - pgp 0xBD356740
| "Ye shall know the truth and -- the truth shall make you free"
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