Budgets and spending Foundation money

[Neil McGovern <neil gnome org>]

Hi all,

As I mentioned in a previous mail, we had a Foundation Hackfest this
October, in which we were looking at ways of making it easier to access
Foundation funds.
Allan Day, Nuritzi Sanchez, and Alexandre Franke already blogged about
some of this [0][1][2], but this is a follow up to describe what we've
now implemented in a bit more detail.

Budgets
-------

The primary place which we're collecting this information is at https:/
/wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/BudgetAndSpending, and links off there. This
holds the current policies that have been approved by the board, as
well as...
*drumroll* - this year's approved budget! We think it's important for
Foundation members to be able to see this, and so it's linked above.
The budget itself should be fairly self-explanatory, but if anyone has
some questions, please let me know and I'll do my best to explain.

Policies
--------

Two new policies also got approved - the spending policy and the
reserves policy.

Spending Policy: For spending, the previous position was that the board
had to give their approval before any Foundation money was spent -
which means a full vote of the board. We've introduced new approval
limits (ie: greater than the zero it was before) in order to make
things a bit more flexible. Additionally, there's the concept of budget
holders - people or teams who can approve spending. These will be
reviewed on an annual basis.
Currently, there's not much change to the way things work for the
Travel Committee. Sysadmin funds can be handled by Andrea Veri
directly, and the engagement team (or more specifically, Nuritzi) can
approve items from the marketing and 'small events' areas.

Reserves Policy: Reserves is an interesting one. We're a 501(c)(3),
which means we're a non-profit. People who donate to the Foundation
want that money to be spent on making GNOME better. On the other hand,
running with zero money in the bank day-to-day isn't the most
sustainable thing to do either. This codifies a good reserves policy -
ie: how much money we should be keeping around to make sure we stay
solvent and are able to continue investing in the project.

Transferwise
------------

We know that a number of people have had trouble with getting payments
through either bank transfer, or paypal. Additionally, the fees to both
recipients and the Foundation are quite high, and exchange rates aren't
the best in some cases.

So, we've heared your feedback and have now trialed a service called
Transferwise. This should hopefully make it easier and cheaper to send
money to Foundation members who need reimbursement. Note that it's not
a magic pill, and there's still some complications for a few countries,
but it should make it easier for the majority of people.

[0] https://www.alexandrefranke.com//blog/20171010-Foundation-hackfest-
in-Berlin/
[1] https://nuritzis.com/2017/10/21/2017-gnome-foundation-hackfest/ 
[2] https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/10/13/policy-hacking/
-- 
Neil McGovern
Executive Director, The GNOME Foundation