On 2013-07-24 15:08, Steve Langasek wrote:
If it does fit in the budget when looked at this way, then as the budget has already been approved, I support Raphaël and Didier moving forward with this plan. Even if some of us don't think this is the best use of the money, it's not fair to those doing the work to come in at the last minute and move the goalposts on them after they've already come up with a plan that fitsthe budget they were given.
Someone already gave one generic reason why that's not automatically true:
The DPL budget approval is an all-but-useless rubber stamp that only blocks the most egregious sorts of abuse, like the DebConf team taking the money and running to Monaco. It should in no way be held up as evidence that thebudget is fiscally responsible; that's something that it's theresponsibility of the DebConf team to ensure, and that includes reviewing at appropriate times *after* the pro-forma DPL approval to ensure the numbers are still reasonable, that we are getting good value for the money, that wecan afford it, etc.
More specifically for this year, the budget approval happened within the context of a debate over whether we could afford a DebCamp or not. To protect the main conference events, "worst case" budgets were assigned to them. That doesn't make it automatically responsible to aim to spend those worst case amounts.
(Since the costs were independent estimates allowing for overspend on individual items, the trading money between line items isn't automatically justifiable. For example, the dinner item was intended to include the cost of buses etc. for a separate event on a different day from the day trip, so combining the two should definitely lead to significantly reduced overall costs for the two.)
In future I suspect we should more clearly separate some kind of "planned cost" and "contingency" for such items. In most previous years all involved made a continual effort to keep costs down, so it didn't seem necessary to add extra stages of bureaucracy over this.
-- Moray