On 8 December 2014 at 19:38, martin f krafft <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> In the past, we've had people approved for travel sponsorship who
> then didn't claim the funds, including those who didn't even tell
> us. While I think that we should make sure that people know that
> this sort of behaviour will negatively impact future bursary
> decisions,
> ...
>
I don't know why you'd think not claiming the funds is ever a bad thing.
Would you think it was a bad thing if they claimed the funds, then made a
donation of the same amount back to Debian/debconf (either immediately, or
a few months later when finances allowed)?
Now, with my budgeting hat on, I'd like to say that I find the idea
> of budget overcommittal quite contrary to budgeting itself.
I think this is mistaken -- if you expect some number/percentage of people
to not take up the travel budget that they have a right to take up you can
(and should) just represent that in the budget. eg:
Intercontinental travel grants:
Average cost: $2,000
Percent covered: 50%
Number offered: 25
Take up expected: 80%
Number expected: 20
Cost (expected): $20,000
Cost (maximum): $25,000
"Local" travel grants:
Average cost: $400
Percent covered: 75%
Number offered: 70
Take up expected: 50%
Number expected: 35
Cost (expected): $10,500
Cost (maximum): $21,000
Total travel cost: $30,500 (expected) $46,000 (maximum)
> Let's
> instead just increase the allocation for the travel sponsorship
> budget and be prepared to know what to do with money we don't spend.
A budget is meant to help you plan and make decisions -- so if you're
expecting only 2/3rd of the travel budget that you end up offering to be
taken up, you want to be able to both (a) know how much that 1/3rd is in
actual dollars so you can plan some fun/productive things to do with it;
and also (b) keep track of whether your expectations are panning out, so
that if your estimate's wrong, you can take action on it before there's an
actual disaster on your hands.
Having columns covering different scenarios for each of the budget line
items, something like:
- already committed to
- worst case scenario (no sponsors, max attendance, etc)
- conservative estimate (last conference -10%)
- realistic/optimistic scenario (best conference ever)
might work. I think those columns would work well since they're a strict
progression from better to worse -- with what's already happened providing
a lower limit that keeps the budget tied to reality as the conference grows
nearer. The idea would be that all the numbers in the "worst case" scenario
add up to a loss that Debian can handle, while ideally the conservative
estimate about breaks even, and in the optimistic scenario, you provide
some funds back to Debian that can help next DebConf, etc. It can tell you
things like "okay, in our worst case scenario we can't actually accept more
than 50 sponsored attendees, but we're still expecting/hoping to be able to
cover 100 based on the sponsors we're working on" or "with the current
committed sponsors, we can only make the worst case remain at an acceptable
loss by not having the ballroom gala, so we still can't commit to that yet".
Here the "worst case" would be 100% take up of travel grants, while your
conservative estimate might just be whatever happened in previous years.
(Note that from a budget perspective more attendees is "worse", even though
from a wider perspective it's better -- budgets are simple: less money at
the end of the day = bad, more money = good)
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <[email protected]>
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