On 15/03/15 at 11:28 +0100, martin f krafft wrote: > Our problem wrt money is IMHO that we don't have cash flow, i.e. > recurring, plannable, dependable income, which can be allocated to > budgets and necessary expenses, bypassing the substance which then > only serves as our backup. > > The substance is one of the two things that distinguishes us from > a startup seeking cash flow. The other difference is that we already > have a very strong brand. It won't happen without careful design and > a lot of work on our behalf, but it should definitely be possible to > create this cash flow, especially if it were a project decision and > delegated to a few. I agree that it should be possible to improve on identifying a recurring, plannable, dependable income. But there hasn't been much response to requests for help in the related areas. For example, I only got one answer to the call for help for the partners program, which has been stuck for months now. The auditors team is also clearly under-staffed. Regarding fundraising, we actually force the ones willing to organize DebConf to do our fundraising, while it would be much more sensible to have a 'Debian fundraising team' that just collects funds for Debian, have Debian allocate funds to the DebConf team for DebConf organization. But if we decide now that the DC16 team doesn't need to do fundraising because a Debian team will do that, and call for help to build such a Debian team, I fear that we might not get enough volunteers ;) Additionally, it is one of the areas of Debian where it's better if the DPL is not too involved, to maintain a clear separation of powers between the one making decisions (the DPL) and the ones making sure that those decisions are sensible (the auditors). So, unless there are people who are willing to do more work in that area, I fear that we will be stuck in the statu quo, and discuss this again during next year' DPL campaign. I wonder if this is actually such a big issue: there are many areas of Debian where things are not perfect, but are sufficently OKish not to be blockers. As long as we don't want to spend much more money, as teams are fine with not having annual budgets (but with each expense being approved separately) , and as we can continue to ignore potential sponsors that request a summary of Debian's income and expenses, we can probably continue like that. - Lucas
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