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Re: Q to all candidates: spending money



On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 08:58:35PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Neil McGovern <neilm@debian.org> [2015-03-20 19:39 +0100]:
> > However, let me be clear: I intend on spending /more/ than that
> > surplus. I would like our reserves to be at a lower level than
> > they are now.
> Why? What target level are you aiming for and what's the rationale?

A reasonable approach might be to set a budget for expenses as a
percentage of the previous reserves (plus any explicit fundraising,
eg sponsorship of debconf).

SPI numbers for 2014 look something like:

 - earmark at 2014/01/31: ~$195k (dc14: $12k)
 - earmark at 2015/01/31: ~$188k (dc14/15: $32k)
 - non-dc14 expenses feb 2014-jan 2015: ~$40k

40k is about 21% of $190k, so just saying "we'll spend about 21% of our
reserves" could be plausible.

If we had a stable income, then adopting that process would lead to
a steady state where reserves are about 4.8 times whatever Debian's
annual income is. It looks to me like Debian's ex-debconf SPI income is
somewhere in the range of $40k to $60k per annum?

So if you wanted to have a reserve of $100k (ie 2x income), that would
involve spending 50% of the reserve each year -- so $94k from $188k this
year, $72k from $144k next year, $61k from $122k the year after etc,
trending to $50k from $100k.

(Note that this breaks down if you want a reserve <= annual income:
it'd imply spending 100% or more of reserves. You could address that by
budgetting in quarterly or monthly cycles instead of annual though. So
maintaining a 40k reserve on a 40k annual income might mean maintaining
a 4x reserve on a 10k quarterly budget, so each quarter you can spend 25%
of the reserve, rather than each year spending 100% of the reserve)

> Also, you intend to spend more than surplus, which at the moment you
> could. What about next year's DPL, or the year after that?

I think the above offers a reasonable approach there. Still warrants
deciding what the desired ratio between income and reserves should
be though.

Cheers,
aj


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