2016-09-19 19:36 GMT+02:00 Zacharias Mitzelos mitzie@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
unfortunately all are correct and some other circumstances causes the issue, that the legacy FAD in Rheinfelden was not hols last year and also not this year (in december). The legacy Rheinfelden FAD (if I'm allowed to call it so) has just one big topic: Define the dates, where EMEA Ambassador want to join an event in the next Red Hat fiscal year and fix the money we (in EMEA) need from Red Hat to sponsor that events/attendance/accomodations. Beside that we mostly also talked about swag and what we want to have and what we want to getdone but moste, nothing happened in that area; unfortunately ... So I'd like to come up with an other idea: Most of the responsible and involved Ambassadors are at FOSDEM (anyway). Why don't we spend the friday in front of FOSDEM for our annual Budget FAD (for EMEA Ambassadors) having a social event (called beer event from FOSDEM) and have one strong day to discuss, argue and point out what to do, who and when. If that is fixed, we can create tasks for fixing everything and can have a second (virtual meeting) aroung eastern to get it "write in stone" and give it to Red Hat for approval.
Other topic in that idea is also to maybe get the FPO (just one day earlier than FOSDEM) to our EMEA event and have a "responsible Red Hat person" on the table where we get better in touch than in IRC and maybe we get the chance to have him exclusively (because during the year he is not that often in our community present in person).
If you all agree, I'll be happy to check if I can organize everything for such a FAD (location and budget [*g*] etc.).
So let me know your opinion
C u soon Gerold