[Board] Proposal/thoughts for a FOSS4G Advisor Role

[Paul Ramsey]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Daniel Morissette
<dmorissette at mapgears.com> wrote:
> On 11-11-22 12:07 PM, Peter Batty wrote:
>>
>> Jeff seemed resistant to this role having ownership of the success of
>> the conference, but right now we're in the crazy position that we
>> entirely hand financial responsibility (and more) over to an unpaid
>> volunteer who we may not know well, they have no financial incentive to
>> make it a success, and if they make a loss OSGeo covers that. It seems
>> essential to me that we get closer oversight/ownership of this, and this
>> role is the obvious way to do that I think.
>>
>
> As OSGeo treasurer, the fact that we accept full financial responsibility
> for any losses (which is fresh news to me), after handing full financial
> control to the LOC is really something that bothers me a lot, and hopefully
> something that this position can help address.

This is not completely lacking in controls: the LOC is not supposed to
spend without an approved budget, and not supposed to spend outside of
the guidance of that budget. That's way budget approval is such a
bottleneck decision when moving a FOSS4G forward (we have these
schedule issues annually, where the LOC needs to spend, but the budget
approval grinds on and on).

P