also sprach Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au> [2014-12-08 17:49 +0100]:
> I don't know why you'd think not claiming the funds is ever a bad
> thing.
Maybe I failed to express myself. I am only talking about the
situation where
(a) we have more requests than we have money;
(b) bursaries allocates money for everyone up to person P, and
person Q and beyond can't get funding;
(c) person C cancels short-term due to health reasons, while
person F fails to show up (or claim); also, person G gets
other funding and so explicitly surrenders his/her funding.
In that case, I think F's behaviour is bad. But we need to prepare
for a certain percentage of C/F/G for sure.
> A budget is meant to help you plan and make decisions -- so if
> you're expecting only 2/3rd of the travel budget that you end up
> offering to be taken up, you want to be able to both (a) know how
> much that 1/3rd is in actual dollars so you can plan some
> fun/productive things to do with it; and also (b) keep track of
> whether your expectations are panning out, so that if your
> estimate's wrong, you can take action on it before there's an
> actual disaster on your hands.
Absolutely agreed. Note how you are talking about 2/3rd
(undercomitting), rather than starting with a budget of 150%
(overcommitting). ;)
This is precisely what I was trying to say: we only ever budget
100%, anything else seems strange and better be left to people who
like to go bankrupt. We are talking about budgeting, not
entrepreneurial number juggling.
If we don't use up 100%, we have a good plan B for the remainder.
Beers for the bursaries team might come with a conflict of interest,
but beers for the budgeting team should work well. ;)
If we are fastly approaching 100%, or those 100% end up being too
low, we also know what to do.
Budgeting to me is about providing the answers to expected scenarios
before they arise, rather than trying to scrambling for the answers
when they are needed and time is running out, or an angry bank
statement arrived.
> Having columns covering different scenarios for each of the budget
> line items, something like:
The DC15 budget makes use of LibreOffice Calc "scenarios" allowing
you to piece together various, well, uh, scenarios. You can prepare
all the answers you'll ever want/need and adjust them for e.g.
different income situations. It's a bit more complex than a simple
worst/base/best-case presentation you propose in the next paragraph,
and probably far from perfect, maybe overengineered, but I find it
quite useful as a planning tool. Have a look, feedback welcome…
http://git.debian.org/?p=debconf-data/dc15.git;a=blob;hb=HEAD;f=budget/budget.ods
(note that the budget is work in progress and currently just
a playground really. None of the numbers there are to be relied on,
although the income situation reflects the status quo)
> - already committed to
> - worst case scenario (no sponsors, max attendance, etc)
> - conservative estimate (last conference -10%)
> - realistic/optimistic scenario (best conference ever)
Yup. Except I would not commit before the budget is signed off and
once it's signed off, it doesn't easily get changed. Keeping track
of what's committed vs. what's available is not the job of
budgeting, but of the bursaries team.
--
.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debconf.org> @martinkrafft
: :' : DebConf orga team
`. `'`
`- DebConf15: Heidelberg, Germany: http://debconf15.debconf.org
DebConf16 in your country? https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16
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