[Ambassadors] Community Credit Card Stats 2012 and some thoughts ; )

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 02.01.2013, 16:43 +0100 schrieb Joerg Simon:
> posted some thoughts on statistics and some budget stats - maybe it
> helps the budget planing
> 
> http://kitall.blogspot.de/2013/01/fedora-community-credit-card-2012.html

Hi Jörg,

thanks for digging into the numbers and creating these statistics. I
agree they are very valuable. 

Let me comment one some things you raised in your blog post:

The problem with the FAmSCo reports was that cost is too much time to
produce them. We didn't discontinue them because we don't think they
were not important any longer, but simply because it was too much work,
especially when they were done monthly. If there is a way to produce
them easily and it this process is documented, we could think about
bringing them back.
Even if we don't, we should have an annual report. I don't care how it's
done, but we need to have some numbers and some kind of retrospective:
What has changed in the last year? What have we achieved and where did
we fail? I think this is the most important question.

You say you don't see our community develop. I don't think this is true,
I think we need look more carefully. The total number of ambassadors or
the number of new applications are just two indicators. There are many
more: The number of regional meetings held, the number of FAmSCo
meetings, the attendance in these meetings, attendance at events, and
many more I forget at the moment. And looking at these numbers, the
situation is different: We had more regional meetings and more FAmSCo
meetings than ever before and we had more people attending (details to
come).

Then there is another important number: Money. You are pointing out that
in the 7 of 2011, community credit card have spend more money for than
in the complete fiscal year 2012. This is basically the aftermath of Max
leaving which caused a lot of trouble. Short version is: There was a
transition of the budget to another person. This person had problems
with the book keeping and FAmSCo had no idea how much money was spent.
At some point, we were told that we had no money left (or only $5000 for
the rest of the year) and therefor we dramatically had to cut the
expenses.

This turned out to not me true. In fact we had a lot of money left but
did not spend it. As a result, the budget for 2012 was lower. Then there
was the transition from Red Hat's Community Architecture team to the new
Open Source and Standards group, which also caused delay and confusion.
But I think we've cleared it up, at least from the FAmSCo side.

What do we learn from this?
      * The community needs more power. Having too much power in the
        hands of a single person can become a problem when this person
        disappears. We should distribute power and workload on more
        shoulders.
      * We need better controlling. We need to track our expenses.
        Ideally,  FAmSCo should be in the position to figure out how
        much was spent without having to ask somebody.

Jörg, your statics are a good start and will help us a lot to achieve
this. Thanks a lot for your work!

One very minor point though: I think the cost distribution is a little
too detailed. E.g. "Parking/Tolls" and "Fuel" can easily be summarized
under the big "Transportation" portion.

Kind regards,
Christoph