Re: [Debconf-team] Overcommitting travel sponsorship (was: Rough timeline idea for DC15 and the CfP)

[Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au>]

On 9 December 2014 at 03:29, martin f krafft <madduck@debconf.org> wrote:

> 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). ;)

​No, the example I had was you were committed to $46​k, but had good odds (based on hypothetical past experience) of only actually have to spend $30k. The overall budget situation might be:

 Worst case: 

   +$60k sponsorship

   -$46k travel grants

   -$30k venue hire

   -$20k food/accommodation

   =====

   -$36k draw down of debian funds

 Expected case:

  +$140k sponsorship

   -$45k travel grants

   +$15k travel grants refunded to conf

   -$30k venue hire

   -$30k food/accommodation

   -$15k day trip

​   =====

    +$5k return to Debian​

If the above were accurate, conclusions might be that getting the extra $80k sponsorship is needed to (a) break even, (b) have the day trip and (c) increase attendees by 50%; and that if more people claim their approved travel grants than expected, that might mean (a) using some of Debian's funds rather than having the conf return a nominal amount, (b) dropping the day trip, or (c) lowering attendee numbers.

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.

​Unless you know exactly what the future's going to bring, you *should* be number juggling -- there's multiple possible futures and you should be keeping them all in mind, if not literally in the air. I guess it's Germany, so going off reputation or at least cliche, maybe knowing exactly what the future will bring isn't that unreasonable on predicting how much venues, room and board will be. But even so I don't really think you're going to know your sponsor numbers, attendee numbers, or sponsored-vs-non-sponsored attendee mix will be until pretty close to the conference, and I'd be surprised if they don't have big impacts on the budget.

 

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. ;)

​Well, buying beers for people is easy and can be done at short notice. But if you can plan ahead, there are probably much better things you could do with the money to make for a better debconf.

Budgeting to me is about providing the answers to expected scenarios
before they arise,

​Sure -- and what ​Phil and Brian have said is the expected scenario is that the actual result of committing to $x in travel grants will be an expenditure of $y, where y << x.

rather than trying to scrambling for the answers
when they are needed and time is running out, or an angry bank
statement arrived.

​There's two sides -- there's the obvious downside to spending more than you have that you point out; but ​there's downsides to having more than you spend too. Particularly for a non-profit. It's fair better to run a great conference and end up with $1 left in the bank account, than to run a mediocre or merely good conference and still have $20,000 or $100,000. Certainly it's better to err on the side of ending up with more money than less, but it's also better to err on the side of running a great conference.

  

Yup. Except I would not commit before the budget is signed off and
once it's signed off, it doesn't easily get changed.

​I don't think that's realistic either -- the budget is a planning document; it should reflect the current plan, and should change exactly as easily as the group's plan does. The budget shouldn't be a way of blocking changes -- it should be a way of helping the group figure out what compromises and tradeoffs you might have to make as a result of changing direction in one part.

​​Treating the budget as an agile development project (ie, regular updates, regular review and discussion amongst the broader team about bugs and changes, and a focus on testing and validation) is likely to have much better results than doing it more waterfall style (let's write everything we can think of down, make everyone agree to it, and then do exactly what we planned [0]), for all the usual reasons.

​​

Keeping track
of what's committed vs. what's available is not the job of
budgeting, but of the bursaries team.

​Normally both those things are the job of the "treasurer"​... IMHO they go together fairly well: if you don't know what's been committed to, your budget is probably woefully inaccurate; and if you don't know what the budget is, you shouldn't be committing to things.

As far as the actual budget document goes, a few comments (take them or leave them):

 - a municipal rate of 490% ?

 - you may be able to get around VAT by just making a rule of consistently using the ex-VAT costs in expenses in the budget. if you're worried about the cashflow, an estimate is probably as good as the actual number.

 - counting the "Debian seed" as income is really poor practice imo. if you do so, you should have the same figure as an expense, so that the bottom line is still how much dc15 impacts Debian financially overall

 - the "scenarios" feature seems horrible to me; there's too many fiddly things to click, and it's better to be able to see alternate scenarios simultaneously anyway...

 - seems off that the "worst case" expenses still includes $1450 for wine&cheese

 - there's currently two scenarios for travel sponsorship: base at $30k+$30k, and "worst" at $5k+$7k; that's a pretty big difference

 - the room and board expenses seem to be independent of the scenarios on the assumptions page; have you already committed to a minimum occupancy of 350?

Stylistically, it seems like simplifying it would be an improvement -- there's a lot of stuff there that's kind of useful for doing the calculations, but that gets in the way of actually seeing what's going on. I'm not a fan of the colour scheme either; glad I don't have to part my bike there...

Cheers,

aj

​[0] Or claim to be following it exactly while half the group just ignores it entirely...

--

Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au>