Hi John, Thanks for publishing the budget. It's a very useful document to have.
I have a few observations and questions (mostly the same ones I asked of the board before - but this is an opportunity for a more public discussion). john palmieri wrote: > Attached is the 2009 budget put together by Stormy. Due to the economy > our budget shows us eating into the surplus quite a bit. While we will > remain solvent for 2009, it is a burn rate we will not be able to > sustain in 2010 barring changes in funding level and/or reduction of > ongoing expenditures. Those decisions will be made as the year > progresses and we have a more complete picture of where we will be come > December. As I have said we are in good shape for this year but we need > to look to the future in order to find ways to best serve our members. One line I'm missing from the budget is "Balance forward". You mention we're eating into our surplus, but you don't mention how much we have in the bank at the beginning of the year. Running a budget deficit of $83,000 seems a bit mad given the way things are going right now - shouldn't we be tightening our belts anywhere we can? I have some ideas how to get closer to a balanced budget. They mean tightening the belt this year, for the long-term health of the foundation, but I think that's worth doing. As I see it, our minimum expenditure during the year is: Stormy: $96,000 Zana: $27,500 Paychex: $2,400 Taxes: $6,043 Insurance: $2,200 Accountant: $3,500 Office: $592 Bank fees: $3,000 (is there a way to bring these down?) Total: $141,235 And undirected income (that is, income not specifically destined for programs): Advisory board fees: $110,000 Friends of GNOME: $20,000 (budgeted) Google SoC: $15,000 GUADEC 08: $20,000 (provisional) Total: $165,000 That gives us about $24K to play with, *if* we raise $20,000 from Friends of GNOME, everyone pays advisory board fees, and we do pretty well from GUADEC 08. What's unclear from the presentation of the budget is which activities are coming from the foundation surplus, and which will be run only if they're self-funding. As I understand it, hackfests are all conditional on sponsorship and/or financial participation of participants. I assume the same is true of the sysadmin? Given that we have $20,000 raised towards the sysadmin position already, and another $10,000 budgeted from the foundation, how much money do you feel the foundation will need to raise to make this hire? Is 6 months funds enough, or will you try to raise a year's worth before asking someone to commit to sysadminning? Is it to be a contract, or a permanent hire? Is this also the case for re-running the accessibility program? There is a line that $30,000 is money raised last year and unspent on the accessibility program - could that be removed from this year's budget as a budgetted expense, to allow things to be a little clearer on this year's income/expenditure? Other planned expenditures, which don't appear to have fundraising directly associated with them, are: * European & US event box: $2,500 * Latin American Tour: $6,000 * Local group budget: $9,371 * Travel budget: $10,000 Could we cut down this budget this year, given the financial state of affairs elsewhere? If we had an overall community budget of, say, $13,000 I think that'd be great! $28,000 with no income matching up seems too much. Marketing budget: shouldn't we be cutting the expenditure of printing annual reports this year? $2,700 seems like a luxury we can't affort. One last overall remark: Looking at the cover sheet, we look like we're bleeding money, but when you look closer, a lot of the budgeted expenditure is contingent on fundraising. Doesn't it make sense to reflect this in the cover page? For example, programs shows -$28,000 and hackfests -$19,000 but they're not going to happen if they're being 100% funded by the foundation. Once you factor out these, you're back to -$35,000, and if you manage to trim the marketing budget, community budget and bank fees, we could even get down closer to -$20,000 for the year. Factor in the Summer of Code income, and we are close to a break-even budget - especially since I know that Stormy is being very careful with her travel budget and is requesting expenses where reasonable, so I am sure she will not spend all of the $20K travel budget allotted. Also, there is currently no budget line for GUADEC 2009 - isn't there a planned surplus from this year's event also to pay for some things like the Summit and maybe a hackfest? Anyway - I hope my comments are helpful, and reinforce the message that I think the foundation should absolutely try to balance the budget this year, even if that means spending less on travel than intended. The foundation should be building & storing cash reserves for a potentially horrible 2010 if at all possible. Thanks again John! Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
