Followups from Council phone call monday — Budget discussion for this year and beyond

[Matthew Miller]

Here's the rough notes from the call:

    - Inside Red Hat, budget is due _way_ early now. We'll need to
      adjust our planning around that. (Specifically, we need it in by
      October.)
                                                                                
    - This year's budget request is set as same as last year's; we
      won't know for sure until possibly as late as March what we
      actually get.
                                                                                
    - In the future, we need to do our request planning in the Flock
      timeframe. (Discussion before Flock, high-bandwidth in-person
      session at Flock, followup and ratification after.)

    - Council (and specifically Remy as community action/impact lead)
      will work to thoroughly understand budget request, and then act
      as contact for the finance people. Remy will also help maintain
      an overall "state of the budget" document as we go through the
      year.

    - Given the long period between request and actual budget, makes
      sense to also have a second round of planning at the start of the
      fiscal year (which is March, and years are named after the one in
      which they end, so we're in FY16 right now, and the upcoming
      budget is FY17.)
                                                                                
    - Right now, all money is allocated to ambassadors through regions,         
      including Flock and FUDCons, and except for FADs. We want to do
      that differently for FY18 — probably split out at least Flock,
      and have non-regional budget for marketing and other centralized
      community activities.
                                                                                
    - If we want to do more with our money, and request more as needed,
      we need to make sure we're spending what we have already — the
      Council should do a quarterly budget review with ambassadors (and
      in future any other groups). In the future, "no budget" should
      mean "no spending".
                                                                                
    - NA ambassadors in particular need to get a budget organized. APAC
      and LATAM need to get better at spending the money that's
      budgeted.
                                                                                
    - We want to ask for more money to grow Fedora. In order to do              
      that, we need to demostrate that the money we do have is being            
      spent well. Need ambassadors to connect spending to results in a          
      a way that _we_ can take to the budget people.                            
                                                                                
Not mentioned at the meeting, but a thing I'm concerned with and have
mentioned before: having a Fedora presence at conferences is good, but
is it the best use of Fedora money? Do we grow new users at Linux fests
in the 21st century? What things could we do instead?


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