On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 04:58:10PM +0200, Luca Capello wrote:
> The current budget is prone to change given the recent announcement
> about the involvement of the Nicaraguan government [1]. We will have a
> more precise idea of the budget on Friday 8th (I will contact you again
> with the detailed budget), so this is in no way an official request yet.
>
> [1] <http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20120602.185904.8e8f5a7b.en.html>
>
> Nevertheless, the deadline for reconfirmation is planned for June 15th
> and we would like to grant travel sponsorship requests before that date.
> There are currently 36 requests for a total of 34'357.00 USD (out of
> total costs of 53'120.93 USD). If we sort the request from the lowers
> to the highers, with 15'000 USD we could fulfill the first 25 requests,
> while with 25'000 USD we could reach 33 participants, almost all.
>
> What is the official Debian position?
In general terms, Debian position is the one we agreed upon with the
chairs last year, and it's one I hope will remain in the long run.
Namely: debconf money is debian money and vice-versa, but we do
accounting of debconf money (for a "short" time window around the
conference) to help with the goal of having debconf an amortized 0-cost
event (one year it might have surplus, another deficit, but it should
try to balance over time).
But the above would mean that the DPL has to approve every single
DebConf expense, which is annoying (especially for me :-)). So the idea
was that, *before* starting a DebConf "cycle", there should be a
tentative budget that is approved by the DPL; further expenditures on
that budget are dealt with by the chairs, without having to ask the DPL.
Extra expenses outside that budget, i.e. the "extraordinary" ones,
should go through the DPL as well, which helps in minimizing them and
provides an incentive in reducing costs.
Now, the problem with *this* specific DebConf cycle is that it's the
first one and the implementation is not yet complete. In particular, I
haven't seen any "preliminary" budget and we're less than one month away
from the conference :-) It's no big deal, just repeating the above to
ensure we're all on the same page.
As a consequence of the above, however, I lack data to answer your
inquiry. In particular, I've no idea of whether the money you lack are
missing starting from an empty budget, or if they are missing starting
from last year surplus, and in that case whether it was both the USD and
EUR surplus or only one of them, etc. You see the problem. To solve it,
do you have a budget to show me so that I could get an idea of how much
money has been collected, how it's been spent, etc?
We do have money reserves, but we've also recently started a fairly
expensive yearly hw replacement plan, so it's my duty to figure out how
to solve "blanket's too short" issues. To decide one way or another, I
first need to understand why money's are missing.
If, OTOH, you only need a "bank" that guarantees money for sponsorship
exist as a last resort, that has been promised in the past and can be
arranged. But it need to be backed by a reasonable certainty that
sponsorship (or economies) to cover them exist. (But even in that case
--- and that, according to the minutes, is a point that has been raised
in your last meeting --- I don't think that giving travel sponsorship to
everybody who have *asked* for it is a goal. We have seen in the past
people trying to surf debconf travel sponsorship in spite of their very
low Debian involvement, and I guess there are some this year too. Have
them already been excluded from the above figures or not?)
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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