[FAmSCo] FY14 Budget update

[inode0]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Robyn Bergeron
<robyn.bergeron at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings, lovely folks of FAmSCo:
>
> The "Regional Support" portion of the FY14 Budget can be seen here:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FY14_Budget
>
> Please note that the "Premier Fedora Events" and "Discretionary
> Spending" portions of the overall Fedora budget are not outlined on
> this page and are still being balanced a bit and will be forthcoming
> as soon as possible.
>
> The total amount for FY14 regional support is $91,600; for reference,
> the budget in FY2013 was $71,500; in FY2012 was $80,000; in FY11 was
> $100,000.
>
> As noted on the wiki page, some guidance around allocations per region
> per quarter has been provided, based upon proportions of regional
> requests; this is for FAmSCo/Regional ambassador team convenience,
> because math sucks.  Some regions of the world may have been more
> optimistic or realistic than others, and I don't want these
> allocations to become a reason to purposefully request things outside
> a rational scope in order to compete for dollars. I believe that over
> the years, all of the regional teams have done an excellent job of
> balancing out budget and working with other regions to do what's
> needed and right in terms of budget handling, and I expect that to
> continue, since you guys are awesome.

I'd like to share a few thoughts on the budget situation with FAmSCo
before too much time passes. My biggest concern with regional
budgeting has always been that regions will end up fighting with each
other about money and that will be destructive to everything we are
working together to accomplish. It is really important that we not
even give the impression that that is happening.

While we all requested amounts that we viewed as reasonable for
important expenses that we anticipate having in the coming year and we
all now have allocations below the amounts we requested there is some
disappointment in every region. But I do think this will work out well
in the end if we don't spend our time fighting about who gets what
before we actually do our work.

Historically "extra" money has normally been available in two regions
from several sources. Two regions did not spend very much so their
"share" was reallocated on the fly to places where spending was
needed. There has always been some discretionary budget that at times
has been used to help out when there was a budget pinch in the
ambassador area. And Red Hat at times has "found" more funding for us
when we really needed more funding. I don't expect any of that to
change so let's not panic about perceived shortfalls in our regional
budgets. I at least am confident that when real need exists and budget
doesn't exist funding will be made available.

While we don't get to see inside the internal Red Hat funding
discussions I imagine there to be quite a bit of guesswork when it
comes to regional funding and that it is largely based on either
historical spending levels or trust in some particular people who make
a case for some particular amount. It will be much easier for those
funding decisions to made in the future based on actual needs as
demonstrated to Red Hat by us sticking with the plan. We propose
budgets, we do and document our funding needs, and each year Red Hat
will have better information to baseline our overall budget with based
on facts that we provide.

One of the reasons we have a budget is because Red Hat won't like us
having to ask them every other day for funding this or that. But that
is exactly what we will be doing if we don't have enough budget to
cover our needs this year. I look at this as an opportunity to further
demonstrate to Red Hat that we really do need a larger baseline budget
to work with and I think they will see that over time as well.

My advice is to accept the budget given to us and proceed with our
plans to promote Fedora around the world. In quarters where a region
gets in a pinch we can work together to reallocate some funding from
other regions if there is unused funding available in them or ask Red
Hat to help deal with those shortages as they come up. To the extent
that we need to ask Red Hat for additional funding happens it will be
a reminder to Red Hat that we proposed budgets that actually reflected
need and that in the future should lead to baseline budget
adjustments.

John