[FAmSCo] NA Budget

[Christoph Wickert]

Hi,

as you all know we have a very tight budget this year, at least in some
regions. EMEA already had to cut its spending.

In order to use the money we have efficiently, we need to carefully
track expenses. FAmSCo has been working on this in the past and I think
we have improved the processes a lot. We wanted to streamline them
further throughout the regions, but members of the NA community
objected. They said that NA already has a good process in place and
there was no reason to change that.

What I see now however is that all regions have their budget nicely in
the wiki, except for NA. While the other regions manage to get along
with their money, NA only spends a very small amount of what they
planned.

John does an excellent job handling the credit card. You can find his
reports at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Inode0/community_credit_card_report

Unfortunately John doesn't know more details. A lot of stuff gets paid
by Red Hat directly and sometimes our contributors don't even get to see
the invoice. So even if they participated in an event, they have no clue
how much money has been spent.

Then somebody pointed me to this spreadsheet: 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApBrbq5j6NbOdG0zQzVvR3VqQ05NaE5xaDdLOWh3a0E

It seems it was done at Lawrence and I think it's a good start for the
budget planing. The tracking however is messy. Where do the numbers in
the columns "Actual" and shipping come from? How much is actually left?

In order to improve the situation, we need to clarify a few questions:
      * Who's the owner of that Google spreadsheet?
      * Is there some form of tracking for NA expenses except John's CC
        reports?
      * Can we identify all people who are making payments?
      * Is there somebody who can do the bookkeeping? All other regions
        have a treasurer, can we have somebody from NA, too?

Depending on the answers to these questions, we can think about the next
steps. 

I think we really need to clean up the budget now. It's not getting
better if we wait any longer. If we do not spend our money, Robyn will
have a hard time justifying our budget next year and as a result, it
will be cut again.

Please help us spending our money and tracking the spending. Feedback
and ideas are appreciated.

Thanks,
Christoph