[Debconf-team] Le Camp / payment terms / the DebDebt?
Quoting the two points from Holger's email on payment terms:
"* About paying in advance: we agreed to put something in the contract
to pay
30k end of February 2012, second 30k end of May 2012, "but": two weeks
later
is fine and if we'd only had 25k at that moment it would also be no big
issue.
This will obviously not be part of the contract (because it would be silly)
but we all 4 consider it part of the deal.
* All the rest (aka the final bill) is due at the end of the conference,
which I think expresses the mutual trust nicely. And is also very
convinient
to us."
For the instalments: has DebConf usually raised cash so quickly and so
far in advance? I have previously heard that most cash comes 1 month
before DebConf.
For the final bill:
- at first glance, it appears positive that people won't be standing in
the street if money is not paid in advance, but a deeper reflection on
this should raise concerns
- when things like this are done on `credit', it can become harder to
track, e.g. if 400 people show up and start sleeping/camping, Le Camp
will rightfully add that to the bill and may only discover later that we
only raised enough money to pay for 320 sleeping on site. By then, it
might be too late to fix it, because the people have gone and nobody can
ask for them to pay a registration fee or meal supplement (and by the
sounds of things, most people wouldn't want to pay either)
- it also means that there may not be the right kind of pressure on the
sponsorship team. The original scenario (where we could lose the 60k
installments and have been standing in the street with nowhere to go)
was very risky and the sponsorship team would have been under immense
pressure to raise the remaining 100k after paying the first 60k. I can
imagine everyone feeling sick in the stomach if only half the money was
found, and this can be counterproductive and almost lead to `paralysis'.
The `pay later' option is quite the opposite: there is a risk that
people can slow down a little or even become complacent after paying the
installments.
- there is also the general concept that some people feel `debt is just
bad' or `debt always creates risk'. When people are under pressure and
debt is available, sometimes people just don't find the right balance
(either deliberately, or purely in error, or through misinformation, or
just from trying to please 300 people and losing track of the budget).
The converse argument is that we should only do things if we have money
to pay for them. We could still do this with Le Camp: we just tell them
on day 1 `we raised another 50k, here it is, you now have 110k, don't
expect any more, feed us until the account is empty and then we'll start
scavenging'. However, this is not very elegant and it may be better to
have a more flexible structure that allows us to control the way we
ration the money if there is a shortfall.
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