Re: GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 budget

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Fred:

> I'd like to follow up on the proposal from Utian / Indonesia as my
> connection had issues during the Q&A discussion. There are a few
> important points/questions that must be raised:
> 1. Budget wise: this is a grassroot/community managed conference. While
> HK proposal has a very reasonable budget in line with previous year
> spendings (US 10k-15k), the budget of 48K in Indonesia is over the roof!
> 2. Sponsorship section: are the sponsors listed companies you already
> have dealing with? Do you know how much money they would be willing to
> give?

Why is the Indonesia budget so high?  Perhaps they are inexperienced at
putting together a good competitive budget.  So it might be worthwhile
to encourage them to find ways to make the budget more in-line with
expectations.

For example, if one budget included an income of charging people at the
door and the other did not, then this would make one budget look much
better than the other since the overall cost would be lower for the
one accepting fees.  I'm not sure if this is a good example in this
situation, though.

> -> Remember that we're hoping to cover all conference cost (including
> travel subsidies) with the sponsors we identify and secure. The higher
> the budget the more difficult the task will be. Looking the Indonesian
> proposal makes me think we're targeting almost a 100K budget (with 40K
> for travel subsidies, based on the pre-event survey). Does this really
> makes sense?
> Should the Indonesian team (together with the committee) be able to
> raise that amount of money, does it really make sense to spend 50K in
> the conference alone, when I am sure we can run such an event for 1/3 of
> the amount.

If the Indonesian team has not already secured funding, then they
probably should do so quickly.  If they did have funding already, then
that would, I'm sure, impact our decision.  If they have no clear plan
for securing funding, then this would be a red flag to me.

> So when making your proposal to the committee, think about those issues:
> - costs
> - ability to cover those costs
> - benefits for the GNOME foundation (vs buying hardware that will never
> be reused for example)

Good points.

Brian