2016-09-19 19:36 GMT+02:00 Zacharias Mitzelos <mitzie(a)mitzelos.com>:
Hello everyone,
It's time to start planning for our annual EMEA FAD!
The EMEA FAD is an annual planning event for the EMEA community. Active
ambassadors from various countries get together to discuss what
activities we should do in the next year, what events to attend, and
what swag to produce. The main outcome of this event is the EMEA budget
proposal for the next fiscal year which includes a list of events we
will spend money on, Fedora media production, and swag production.
This 2-day event is usually hosted in early December, and we don't have
a location yet, so I'd like to ask you all to consider submitting a bid
for a potential location to host the EMEA FAD this year.
Hi Zacharias,
I'm sorry for chiming in so late, but I feel I have to clarify something.
We did not have a FAD last year and to my understanding, this was due
to the changes in Red Hat's schedule and Budget.Next. This being said
I am not sure how much sense it makes to have a FAD this December.
Let me give you some background: Traditionally, regions needed to
submit their budgets by end of January and that's why we had a FAD in
December. Due to organizational changes within Red Hat, this deadline
has been moved to October. At this point, the Council needs to submit
the budget to Red Hat. Before that, it needs to gather the different
budgets, check and approve them and add their own share on top. All of
this takes some time, that's why the budget proposal deadline has been
moved to July, means half a year earlier than in the past. We are not
happy about it, but we cannot change it.
For more details about the process and the schedule, please refer to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Budget.next#The_Fedora_Budget_Process
Due to the switch to Budget.Next and the changes on Red Hat's side,
the council was facing some problems. We had to submit a budget before
we had any requests. decause, who had designed and coordinated the
Budget.Next process, had just given up his job as Fedora Outreach and
Impact lead. Last but not least our reporting and controlling are
really bad, we are having a hard time to catch up with what we
actually spend. Without proper reporting, it's hard to justify an
increase of the budget, so we ended up doing some scenarios (regional
spending vs. premiere events vs. outreach etc.) and just requesting
the same amount of money we had the year before.
This means:
* The Council already submitted the budget for FY18 to Red Hat.
* Once we know how much we actually get, we need to share it among the
regions. See
https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/58 for the FY17
shares.
* Whatever we decide at the FAD will not impact the budget. Only good
reporting will get us more money.
* We not only need to show how we spent our money in the past but also
need a vision of what we want to achieve with it in FY18.
* Budget.Next was a big change. It goes into the right direction, but
has some flaws. We will probably see more changes in the process,
which will make planning for us even more complicated.
* With bexelbie's help, we should be able to to iron out the kinks,
but it's probably going to cost some time.
This being said, I'm not not sure if it makes sense to have a FAD in
December as we used to. Unless there is urgent business (event
planning, swag production) we cannot do virtually, we should target
something in March next year.
Please don't get me wrong: I'm not against holding a FAD, I'm sure we
can get a lot of things done. But I'm unsure about the timing because
we already missed the deadline for this year.
Best regards,
Christoph