[FAmSCo] money money money

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Freitag, den 17.02.2012, 15:39 +0800 schrieb Harish Pillay:

> Actually, I've been working on chasing down all the expenses that are
> paid out by the CommArch cost center and it continues to be challenging.
> 
> As of today, Feb 17, the numbers I have for Fedora are as follows:
> 
> Item 			 Budget 	  Spend
> Premier Fedora Events 	$ 90,000 	$ 49,362
> Regional Support 	$ 80,000 	$ 76,385
> Discretionary Funds 	$ 15,000 	$ 12,716
> 			========	========
> Total 			$185,000 	$138,463 
> 			========	========
> 
> I've updated https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_Architecture_expenses
> accordingly. I've updated the FUDcon expenses but if you look at the 
> numbers, the Blacksburg amount is way too low.  But that is what I have on 
> record. I've not updated the regional section of that page though.

Thanks for the update, Harish.

I think it will help us a lot. Unfortunately the basic problem remains:
Totals and details on the list don't match:

			Total		Detail		Difference
Premier Fedora Events	49.362		41.493		 7.869
Regional support
  NA			23.505		23.505
  EMEA			16.270		16.270
  APAC/India		 7.780		 7.780
  LATAM			 6.635		 6.635
Regional support        76.385		54.190		22.195
Discretionary funds     12.716		10.100		 2.616
							32.680

This means that we have no information about nearly one third of our
budget.

There also seems to be a problem with the POs. We had a PO over USD 5000
for the EMEA media, but we never actually spend this money. The receipts
are all in FAmSCo's trac (in the same tickets that was used to ask for
the budget the PO), nevertheless all that shows up in the expense
reports every year is the PO. I find it hard to believe that we have no
way to incorporate the feedback.

I am skipping large parts of your mail because I agree to everything you
write, namely
We need somebody who is familiar with accounting
Part time should be fine
This person must work for Red Hat because he/she needs access to Red Hat
Systems
We need a better link between CommArch and RH Finance people. The
problems in communication make CommArch and FAmSCo look bad.

> For FY13, I am sharing tentative budget numbers (waiting for final 
> approval hopefully by end of this month or very early March 2012).
> 
> Item 		       Proposed Budget
> Premier Fedora Events 	   $ 90,000
> Regional Support 	   $100,000
> Discretionary Funds 	   $ 20,000
> 			   ========
> Total 			   $200,000
> 			   ========
> 
> These numbers were arrived at after much negotiation. I am hoping
> that they will not be reduced.

I think the best way to make sure they are not reduced is to convince
people that this money is well spent. And that can best be achieved by
spreading the word about or work. We need more and better event reports,
more blogging and all this. Unfortunately the last FAmSCo has done a bad
job here: Jörg was trying to get the number of events we held or
attended in the last 2 cycles, but there is no consistent and complete
documentation. I will enforce this in the new FAmSCo.

Kind regards,
Christoph