Hi Moray,
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. > > We didn't assign worst case budgets to those events. The "worst case" budgets were assigned to separate line items: (e.g. taxes, incidentals, internet connectivity, ...) The budgets for day trip / conference dinner were still on the low side for Switzerland. > (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.) > > Yes, combining the two events leads to cost savings by combining the boat trip back from Neuchatel to Vaumarcus with the dinner. If the conference dinner had been held seperately, a boat trip + transportation would have been too expensive. > 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. As I said above the expenses were NOT contingency, but expected costs to do a day trip/conference dinner in Switzerland. The contingency is: a) in the extra line items as mentioned above and b) in realistic estimates of our expected income and c) in being able to scale down some events in case we don't raise the expected amounts. The sponsors team worked hard to raise this amount of money to hold a nice DebConf in Switzerland and a lot more attendees chose to pay for their own food and accomodation than we expected. Thanks to this and due to some contingency money we won't need, it would also be possible to spend more than we planned in the budget, if we decide to do so. Philipp
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