Help us prepare a budget for 2008!

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi,

For the first time (I think), we had a budget [1] to help us plan how
we'd spend the Foundation money this year. It turned out money it was
not that closely followed, but it was still useful for us. Dave did the
amazing work on this. You might remember his mail [2] asking user groups
to send requests early to help with the budget preparation.

We're doing this again this year (and I'm glad that Dave accepted to
help). So we need you to tell the board how you'd like to spend the
money. "You" is really everyone in the community. Let me give you some
examples of what we did this year:

 + we sponsored people to go talk about GNOME in conferences (hrm, it'd
   look better if I had built a list of people & conferences, sorry :/)

 + we helped some local groups so they could have some cool stuff when
   they were representing GNOME on a booth, or to help organize some
   events (latest events were the Brazilian GNOME Forum, GNOME day at
   FOSS.in or Open aLANtejo 07, but there were more than that during the
   whole year)

 + there are also the event boxes [3] that are useful (again, would be
   nice to have a summary of where they went... Anybody wanting to help
   with this? :-))

 + we sponsored people to go at the accessibility summit in Boston, and
   also to go to a java-gnome hackfest

 + I'm sure I'm forgetting some cool things that we used the money
   for...

Now is the time to try to tell us how much money you'd need (and of
course, detail why you need it). There are two main cases here, but any
other idea is also welcome:

 + small meetings/hackfests: it's generally quite useful to have a small
   group of people go in one place so they can work on a specific topic.
   It's hard to know how many of this kind of events we can sponsor, but
   3 is generally a magic number :-) If you need some ideas, here are
   some: usability meeting (either work on the HIG, or review the
   desktop UI, or something else), control center hackfest (could work
   for any other module), website hackfest, etc.

 + local groups: if you want to organize events, invite someone to do a
   talk at an event, get some material (t-shirts, flyers, posters,
   etc.), it's always better to tell us about it while we're preparing
   the budget. If you're going to organize many events, send one
   request, but tell us where the money would be going. Eg, $500 to
   print t-shirts for the whole year, $50 for posters for event A and
   $60 for flyers for event B, and also $700 to get Quim to this
   fantastic event! You get the idea.

I guess the goal is to have a rough budget for beginning of next year
and the next board will be able to change it a bit before adopting it.

Thanks,

Vincent

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2007-May/msg00007.html

[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2007-January/msg00013.html

[3] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeEventsBox

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.