On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 12:14:34PM +0000, Moray Allan wrote: > On 2014-03-27 19:52, Steve Langasek wrote: > >And to any members of the DC15 team who may be reading this with alarm: > >note that our max budget is for 143 sponsored attendees, and a $45k > >travel budget. The budget is set with high margins, to try to ensure we > >don't have to turn anyone away who wants to attend; but in practice, the > >bursaries team has usually run out of people to sponsor before running > >out of money. So there's a very good chance that a sizable portion of > >this bursaries allocation will be yours next year, no matter what else > >happens. :) > Please stop propagating the "next year's DebConf inherits surpluses > (but not loan liability)" idea.... I have never said anything of the sort. The maximum amount committed by Debian to DebConf14 funding from the general fund is $20,000 *less* than the total surplus in the DC13 earmark at SPI, which isn't even counting the surplus in the DC13.ch account. This is on top of DC12 which ran a deficit for the year, but according to the DC12 final report this was made up for by previous years' surplus, implying that DebConf has had a cumulative surplus for the past three years running (at least). So it's clear that DebConf14 is *not* "inheriting" a surplus from DebConf13; the expenses have instead been reauthorized by the DPL from the general funds, for a different (lesser) amount than "the DebConf surplus". DebConf should never inherit loan liability because there should never *be* any loan liability. There is no excuse for a DebConf not running a balanced budget. In some years, this may mean that Debian commits more money from the general fund, to avoid sitting on piles of cash and to cover any shortfalls in DebConf fundraising; but this should always be based on an explicit decision by the DPL that this is an appropriate use of project funds, and I have never said anything to the contrary. What I *have* said, and stand behind, is that the DebConf team should be willing to ask Debian for a funding committment (not a loan) early in the cycle, to provide important liquidity and funding certainty; and that the DPL should be willing to approve such requests, limited by the project's overall budget/reserve requirements, the running cumulative surplus from past DebConfs, and a reasonableness test. If the concern here is that DebConfs are a net drain on Debian's financial resources over time, then perhaps it would be a good idea to require explicitly accounting for this as part of the annual conference budget report. E.g., the budget draft I've prepared for DC14 calls out the "net from Debian", because I think this is an important thing for us to know and measure ourselves against. > All DebConf money is Debian money. We have agreed that Debian will > fund gaps in the DebConf budgets, rather than requiring it to be > self-sustaining each year, on the basis that surplus is absorbed > back into Debian funds. (Previously, we hadn't given up surpluses, > but had taken quite a lot from Debian general funds.)) I agree with > your point to the extent that if we make consistent surpluses we can > more easily draw on them, but also remember that one year we could > have a real disaster and want to draw on a larger amount of general > funds unexpectedly. Any such disaster would be of our own making, and really should not be tolerated. If the DPL had said "no" to our request for DC14 funding, I would have fought for the cause because I think this is the right thing for us as a project; but ultimately we would have run the conference with the money we had, not the money we wanted. I would expect no less from the team in any other year. (And I think DC13 signing a contract with a termination penalty in excess of currently available funds, with a DPL promise to bail the DC13 team out if necessary, was a bad precedent for exactly this reason.) -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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