Re: Question to all candidates: Ongoing/future legal projects
Hi Richard
On 2022/03/24 22:17, Richard Laager wrote:
The disbursements that I've heard about seem to be relatively "small
potatoes" things. Is there some huge wasteful spending occurring that
I've missed?
Most of it is small potatoes (typically less than $1000, typically for
hardware or travel or meetings). Some are really big potatoes, when DSA
does big upgrades it can be 10s of thousands of dollars. The only cases
of waste I know of happens when people ask for sponsorship for DebConf
and then hotel space is made for them (and possibly other expenses) and
then they just don't show up without any heads-up. Even those are rare,
but it's the only instances of really wasting any money that I can think of.
One anti-pattern I've seen with spending money (not Debian, but
elsewhere) is that a group will spend e.g. $10x worth of time debating
$x expense. Sometimes that is appropriate, if you're confronting a new
class of spending that will be repeated and you need to develop a policy
to apply. But often, it's just a waste because people want to bikeshed.
Oh I've seen this in Debian. 2 seperate meetings about the price of cups
(that could potentially save a few $10) where the collective salaries of
the people in the room would be over a hundred times that for one hour.
Especially in DebConf people want to save money, and it's great, but I
like to encourage them to spend a bit more where it can save a lot of
volunteer time, and also where it can increase quality (I consider it
wasteful if we, for example, buy a t-shirt so cheap that the only thing
someone would want to do with it is wash their car with). In cases like
those spending a bit more is using our money more efficiently.
-Jonathan
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