Dear Friends, I thoroughly admit/confess about debconf event planning works and thought this probably would be the most appropriate way to understand how things work and have it recorded for posterity and historical reference.
It is purely an academic pursuit at the moment. I had a look at https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Accounting https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Budgeting https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Fundraising https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/TravelSponsorship https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/YearlyBudget and last but not the least https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/MoneyFlow Sadly, it seems most of the content is somewhat outdated but dunno the reasons for that, the usual suspect might be simply lack of time from volunteers. The reason I ask is it is not articulated anywhere formally as how the whole the budgeting thing works. Observing from the various interactions on various mailing lists and IRC, this is how it seems to work - 1. Advertise to potential pool of advertisers to support debconf and how they can have value out of that relationship. Many are long-time supporters so that latter part is not shared but implied. 2. Sponsors who reply in the affirmative are given invoices. The invoices are similar to IOU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOU but in a formal sense. 3. From the sponsorship money, the debconf-team gets an informal budget from which all expenses, i.e. travel, accommodation sponsorships (probably a big slice of the budget), catering, venue and catering for last dinner night are added in. The idea is usually to have a surplus so that some money is kept for a rainy day. If there is a short in the budget, the DPL is requested to either make the short good from debian's budget although at times a late surge in sponsorship may reduce or cancel that as well. There is also a possibility to reduce the travel and accommodation bursaries as well. 4. After debconf finishes, reports are shared with the sponsors about both the travel kit as well as how their names were there on the various banners, t-shirts etc. depending upon the sponsorship tier they were in. 5. Sponsors are pinged to get the invoices good. 6. After money is received, money is paid to those who were promised travel sponsorships within the budget prescribed and who had submitted the documents asked. 7. Depending upon when the above is all done, all receipts are done, payments done and auditors auditing the account the debconf final report is presented as matter of public archives. Am I correct in assuming the above flow . I know there are lot more details and about a dozen or more mini sub-steps in what I have shared. If the above simplified explanation is true, where should I put up the same, on what wiki page so that's its found with a preferably a link to the discussion topic for future debconf planners. Look forward to know more. -- Regards, Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com EB80 462B 08E1 A0DE A73A 2C2F 9F3D C7A4 E1C4 D2D8
