Re: Proposed Adjusted Budget Scenarios for FY17

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 09:05:12AM -0700, Mark Terranova wrote:
> Glad to see more TOSW applied. /me still has concern we are aiming for
> stasis, rather than growth. What about new contribs? They are joining and
> it seems to me that they will concern local folks- there is only so much
> money to go around. New contribs = less money for people's existing events.

Growth is _absolutely_ the target, both in userbase and in engaged,
active, happy contributors. I'm personally more interested in the
contributor part, but in order to a) have contributors' work actually
be useful and meaningful and b) have a pool of contributors at all, we
need user growth too. So, we have the Fedora.next three-editions
strategy, which is aimed at that.

The numbers show that it is working: we _are_ growing. This is
excellent — but, we can't simply tell Red Hat "Look, we're growing, so
give us more money." The response to that is "What are you doing with
the money we've been giving you?" — and, frankly, other than saying
"Well, we hope that the positive numbers we're seeing are linked to
whatever we spent it on", we don't currently have a good answer to
that.

So, this is absolutely not the old budget process. This will allow us
to _really_ answer that question — and not just for Red Hat, but for
ourselves, because as we look together at these hard decisions on where
to spend and where to scrimp, we need to ask ourselves the exact same
thing. For every dollar, does this advance us towards our mission over
other possibilities?

There are millions of dollars worth of things that would be _excellent_
for Fedora to do. Whenever someone says "That's worth an additional
$5000" — well, probably it is, but we only have so many $5000s to go
around.

Let's demonstrate that we are spending in a way that directly advances
the mission through our agreed-upon objectives. Then, we will be in a
solid position to argue that more will advance us even further.

--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm@fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
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