Hello everyone, I was talking with some people last night, and it seems that I'm not the only one worried about our budget. After I got home last night, I tried doing some more budget calculations, based on our knowledge of current costs, the state of sponsorships, and rough approximations of the unknown other costs. I did some work to get better estimates on how much food and accommodation costs will be and our expected attendee fees, and Pablo updated the fundraising numbers.
There are a few hard decisions that we need to make, but we also need to get realistic about the state of affairs and how that does and does not cover sponsorship. We need to start thinking realistically about the sponsorship situation, and make a plan that will work regardless of how much extra funds we manage to raise. Things aren't as bad as we originally were thinking last night, but we are not in the clear yet. We are currently promising more money than we have, which is a bad idea, especially when it is two months before Debconf. For our summary, see http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/Budget There are a few areas where the numbers can fluctuate by +/- $10,000 due to unknowns. This makes getting a clear picture very difficult. These areas are: * Money from Debian: last year $20k was given to Debconf from Debian, the years before no money at all came from Debian. Ideally, no more than 20k would need to come from Debian. * Additional sponsors: at this point, it would be unlikely to get more than $10k in additional sponsorship coming in. If we get even that much, we are lucky. * The line that was drawn for 100% bursary amount is currently at $20k, but the ideal line would be $32k. So that leaves us in a few different spots, depending on different things: we are somewhere between $-31,260 short or $10,740 ahead. That is quite a range. The best-case scenario would be to not have to rely on money from Debian, and provide $32k in busary funding. However, that would mean we would be between $-19,260 and $-31,260 short depending on if we can pull in the (not guaranteed) $10k more in sponsorship.[0] I should also emphasize that all of the attendee costs and fees are fuzzy. Not all of the data is correct, so this could suck a fair bit out, too. In terms of for fiscal responsibility (not suck so much out of Debian, save some for future years, maintaining due caution) we should to discuss a how we want to proceed: Future plans ============ Here's what might be realistic to do this year, based on the current late stage of the game: - We reword the reconfirmation emails to say "accommodation sponsorship decisions forthcoming". This is highly non-ideal, but maybe necessary to be honest. By SOME_DATE that is real soon now, if our fundraising activities do not report any substantive improvements: - Decide how much to reduce sponsorship. Perhaps we'll decide to sponsor 50%, instead of 0%. - Establish a team to review Debcamp work plans, and make decisions about if we can afford to sponsor those people. Possibly look at alternative accommodations (hostels, MrBeige's place), ask that they pay their own way. (expected savings: ~4,000-10,000 ) - We look through DebConf attendees food/accommodation sponsorship . This is harder to tell who deserves sponsorship or not, since we want it open to as many people as possible. Our proposed starting point is to allow food sponsorship to everyone, and limit accommodation sponsorship to those with some preexisting relationship to Debian (being very flexible here), and a team would have to be dispatched to make these decisions (expected savings: ???) - As our money situation gets better, we can add more sponsorship for people. Some people won't be able to make it under this system, since it'll be too late, but that's better than risking bankrupting ourselves. As a side note, I realized today that if there was insufficient money to reconcile our bills with Columbia at the end of the conference, it is _my_ reputation on the line more than SPI's (even though it is SPI who is on the line for paying). As such, I'd like to ensure that he can say "we can pay" in good faith, which doesn't necessarily mean having all the money already, but at least having had a real discussion about the budget. Now that we have all the information in front of us, it would be good to know how many other people strongly oppose some of the ideas expressed above, and how many favor more discussion. If anyone has any other ideas, please let us know them, too. So, what do past global people think? - Richard [0] Please see http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/Budget for details on the numbers of our current budgetary situation, as best as we see it from querying penta and Pablo knowing about sponsorship. -- | Richard Darst - rkd@ - boltzmann: up 313 days, 19:59 | http://rkd.zgib.net - pgp 0xBD356740 | "Ye shall know the truth and -- the truth shall make you free" _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
