Monday, April 11, 2016

Today at 18:00 UTC: Fedora Council first FY17 budget review meeting

Sorry for not posting this specific meeting invite earlier - it was
mentioned in the general schedule but I didn't send out this notice Friday
like I intended to, mostly because it's been crazy around my house (sorry
about that).

As you probably all know, this is the first year we're trying something new
with the budget — having the Council discuss and allocate it in the open.

Okay, so: we have the big community budget number from our sponsor (Red Hat,
managed by the Open Source and Standards group, through Remy). The total
amount is the same as FY14, FY15, and FY16 — but that's not as
straighforward as it sounds.

The FY14 budget allocated $91600 to regional support [1], channeled through
the four regional ambassadors' groups. $15000 was set aside for FADS. The
rest — $88400 — was left for Flock, FUDCons, and everything else.

In FY15 [2], the total is the same, but the amount allocated to regions
increased to $100k, with nothing pre-allocated for FADs. That's because for
some reason there was a dry spell of FADs in 2012 and 2013. [3]. But, it
turned out that FY15 was actually quite busy with FADs, as FY16 has been as
well. (The FAD history page at [3] isn't complete — some are still at [4].)

This year is already looking active for FADs again, so we should budget a
good chunk for that — I'm thinking $30k, or _more_ if we want to make sure
each region has its own planning FAD (although I want to put that amount in
the budgets for each region, rather than the central budget — that's a
detail, though, and doesn't change the overall total). Since Flock is in
Europe and we've traditionally had trouble getting significant non-RH
sponsorship there, we need to keep around $80k for that. The LATAM FUDCon is
already planning on $15k — actually, almost $16k, and if we assume another
$15k FUDCon in APAC, that leaves $54000 for regional spending, rather than
the $100000 previously budgeted.

And, to complicate that further, when I look at the FY15 EMEA budget [5] for
example, I see that the _event_ spending aligns roughly with the number from
the allocation email [2], but _swag_ is over that, so that, I think, came
from central funding after all.

And that's not even considering keeping an additional centralized budget
pool for non-ambassador community spending, for example on marketing or
design — or even to meet an engineering need not sponsored otherwise. And I
know Remy wanted some to sponsor internship programs.

So, overall, this is looking like a drastic on-paper reduction of
regional budgets. The "good news" is that from what I have heard, we've
actually signficantly underspent our allocation most years, so it may
just be a matter of keeping better track of things. But, I think we are
going to have to be more careful with spending, and to really think
about the impact of each dollar.

If we don't have enough to get done what we want to, showing that
impact will allow us to put together a strong justification for
increased funding next year.

Remy has put together a Fedora Budget website [6] where the results of all
of this will go, and a git repo [7] to collect all of the information we
have.

Soooooo. Today, we'll have an initial meeting to discuss all of this. I
expect we'll also use next week's meeting primarily for this topic, and the
intervening week for mailing list discussion.

See you in #fedora-meeting in about three hours!

1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FY14_Budget
2. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/famsco/2014-April/001525.html
3. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_-_FAD
4. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Project_Events
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/EMEA/Budget:2015
6. https://budget.fedoraproject.org/
7. https://pagure.io/fedora-budget

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