On 2013-07-24 15:08, Steve Langasek wrote:
If it does fit in the budget when looked at this way, then as the
budget has
already been approved, I support Raphaël and Didier moving forward
with this
plan. Even if some of us don't think this is the best use of the
money,
it's not fair to those doing the work to come in at the last minute
and move
the goalposts on them after they've already come up with a plan that
fits
the budget they were given.
Someone already gave one generic reason why that's not automatically
true:
The DPL budget approval is an all-but-useless rubber stamp that only
blocks
the most egregious sorts of abuse, like the DebConf team taking the
money
and running to Monaco. It should in no way be held up as evidence
that the
budget is fiscally responsible; that's something that it's the
responsibility of the DebConf team to ensure, and that includes
reviewing at
appropriate times *after* the pro-forma DPL approval to ensure the
numbers
are still reasonable, that we are getting good value for the money,
that we
can afford it, etc.
More specifically for this year, the budget approval happened within
the context of a debate over whether we could afford a DebCamp or not.
To protect the main conference events, "worst case" budgets were
assigned to them. That doesn't make it automatically responsible to aim
to spend those worst case amounts.
(Since the costs were independent estimates allowing for overspend on
individual items, the trading money between line items isn't
automatically justifiable. For example, the dinner item was intended to
include the cost of buses etc. for a separate event on a different day
from the day trip, so combining the two should definitely lead to
significantly reduced overall costs for the two.)
In future I suspect we should more clearly separate some kind of
"planned cost" and "contingency" for such items. In most previous years
all involved made a continual effort to keep costs down, so it didn't
seem necessary to add extra stages of bureaucracy over this.
--
Moray
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