FAD planning changes (impact over budget; approval process)

[Zoltan Hoppar]

Hi,

I think these are good ideas, binding the budget and council - but yet
we don't have any tool that can collect, handle or makes it visible
for all teams activities, requests, how much money we left, and
control around our resources (event, swag, ambassadors, collaboration
between another teams - assignments). We need an tool for this that
all the council and the regions can use, FPL can filter our necessary
data, where we members can see, assign, run and connect things
together. We have tons of resources: events, people, budget, timing,
swags - and more. We have already did the first step with Fedora
Calendar, FedMsg - but at least we need an good distributed inventory.
We have made a lot of discussion between the HU community, and we
think that trac and wiki is a bit weak for coordination such big
community. So, therefore our member Levex (Levente Kurusa -
Levex at fedoraproject.org) has begun to build it. He called it simply
FedInv, and he has big plans to what's need to be implemented. You can
find the temporary site at http://fedinv.ilevex.eu/ . For source code
you can ask from his github repository.

Sadly he doing it alone currently, but would be great to have someone
who has python or django skills, and join to help out if someone is
interested.

If we targeting and planning right within this tool, we think then we
can gain huge advantages, and much-much better flexibility within the
community where the FPL and top to bottom of the community can benefit
from it.

Thanks,

Zoltan Hoppar (zoltanh721)
Fedora Project HULUG

2015-04-17 17:08 GMT+02:00 Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>:
> The "How to organize a FAD" page at
> <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_organize_a_FAD> previously
> stated that budget is "the absolute first priority". Now, maybe this is
> my hippie upbringing speaking, but I don't think it's _really_ all about
> the money. I've changed this to "this needs to be a very early
> priority" — it's still important, but I think the first priority in
> planning a FAD should be thinking about the impact the FAD is intended
> to have.
>
> That should be both in concrete terms of "What're we gonna get done?"
> but also _"What does this do for the project overall?"_ (Or, I guess,
> if you _do_ want to make it all about the money, "Why should we spend
> on this?")
>
>
> I'm going to pull out this ASCII chart again:
>
>  /============+============+=============++=============+=============\
>  |            |            |             ||             |             |
>  | Resources  | Activities |  Outputs    || Outcomes    |   Impact    |
>  |            |            |             ||             |             |
>  +------------+------------+-------------++-------------+-------------+
>  |What we     |What we do  |The direct   ||The specific | Mission and |
>  |have: time, |with our    |products of  ||change in the| vision; our |
>  |money, code,|resources   |our          ||world due to | long term   |
>  |hardware... |            |activities   ||those outputs| effect      |
>  +============+============+=============++=============+=============+
>  | Things we can affect directly         || Out of our direct control |
>  +============+============+=============++=============+=============+
>  |           <----- planning flows right to left ---------<           |
>  +============+============+=============++=============+=============+
>  |           >------ effort flows left to right ---------->           |
>  \+===================================================================/
>
>
> Starting with money is planning from the left side — it's a resource.
> This doesn't result in the best use of those resources. Obviously,
> there are pragmatic *limits* to those resources so that number needs to
> go into the on-the-ground planning, but if we start from the change we
> want to effect, we can better judge if a particular goal fits within
> what we have, or is worth finding more by reallocating or fundraising.
> And, it avoids overspending based on "well, we've got this budget, so
> let's make sure to use it up".
>
> Additionally, unless there is objection, and I hope there isn't, I'm
> adding wording that FADs which are connected to the Council's accepted
> 12-18 month community goals will be given priority.
>
>
> I also have another pair of changes to propose. Currently, the
> procedure is to work with OSAS on the budget and with the FPL for final
> approval. I have suggested tweaks to both of these.
>
> In line with the Council plan overall, I'd like to change the "work
> with the OSAS team to figure out the budget" part to "work with the
> Fedora Council". As defined in the Council charter, facilitating
> decision making on focusing the OSAS-provided Fedora community budget
> is one of the Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator's roles
> (hi Remy!), and this seems like a natural place to do that. (We could
> also make the wording "work with the Community Action and Impact
> Coordinator" rather than council at large.) Of course, the Council (and
> Remy, who *is* on the OSAS team inside of Red Hat) would work with OSAS
> in the determination — the change isn't in where the money comes from
> ultimately, but in the contact point for organizers (and in
> transparency and visibility).
>
> Second, I'd like to change the FPL approval to Fedora Council approval.
> This is largely a matter of transparency — usually, these requests are
> mailed to me directly, and I think it'd be better to talk about them
> here instead. (This obviously makes a lot of sense in conjunction with
> talking about the budget with the council too.) Not that I have a
> problem being the approver per se, but it'd be nice to have this
> process be more open to community input.
>
> Thoughts, comments, objections, refinements?
>
> --
> Matthew Miller
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> Fedora Project Leader
> _______________________________________________
> council-discuss mailing list
> council-discuss at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss



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