Re: Questions for candidates - board processes & significance

[Stormy Peters <speters mozilla com>]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:48 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

Since a number of candidates aren't aware of this situation, perhaps I should give a few details.

LGM has an annual budget which is pretty tiny - in the region of $20,000 to $30,000 per year, including a big chunk going to sponsored travel.

For a number of reasons, a small number of the sponsored attendees at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montreal were not reimbursed their travel costs until May 2010. Then in 2010, a number of attendees were not reimbursed until just before LGM 2011, which was held in May this year.

In addition, there were issues in 2008 which had nothing to do with the GNOME Foundation (but I believe the foundation helped resolve them at the time), due to dealing with a Polish non-profit for the event.

In the light of these continued difficulties, Louis (lead organiser for the past 5 years of LGM) proposed that the Quebecois LUG of which he's president could take over the management of the funds. And finalising the transfer of funds from the GNOME Foundation took several months of over & back with the board & the lawyers.

There's more to this story than this. Rosanna would be the one to fill us in. However, I do know that in many cases they did not send receipts and information. When we asked for it, they didn't have it and had to go back to those who were being reimbursed.  They blamed that time on GNOME. They also expected immediate action every time and Rosanna has a process she uses to process all expenses.

That said, I do not think we handled it well either. GNOME needs an easier way to track finances if we are going to track for different groups.

Stormy