[Board] 2013 Budget approval

[Daniel Morissette]

On 13-03-14 4:16 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> On 15/03/13 03:09, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
>>
>> My opinion is that we don't have to budget for all eventualities.  As
>> long as we have adequate reserves/income we can pass motions for
>> special needs.  We put things in the budget to understand likely
>> expenses and also to "preauthorize" expenses so they don't have to
>> come back to the board for authorization.  For instance, once we have
>> authorized funding for SAC, they can spend it in cooperation with the
>> Treasurer without further board motions.
>>
>> Who owns the "other professional services" item is not super clear to
>> me, so I don't know who would be preauthorized to spend that money nor
>> what would be appropriate to spend it on.
>>
>> I'd prefer then to keep such open ended items out of the budget, and
>> instead for us to just address special needs as they come up.
>>
>> I don't mind an item like "code sprint support" since it gives us a
>> sense of how much we expect to spend on this over the year, and we can
>> try to calibrate what we authorize as a board with the idea that all
>> requests should fit into that limit.
>>
>> What belongs in, and not in the budget is certainly a fuzzy issue!
>
> Frank, I'm comfortable with your explanation and suggestions here.
> I feel the person to make the call on what should/should not be included
> in "other professional services" is our esteemed treasurer, Daniel.
> Daniel, do you care to comment?
>


Frank, Cameron, Board,

I agree with Frank that we should not allocate too many open-ended 
items, but in this specific case, both Jeff (via his note in the Google 
Spreadsheet) and then Cameron commented in favor of it, nobody commented 
to the contrary, and it seemed to make sense to me so I added it.

I assumed that those funds would be for any unplanned professional 
services that could either help our admin situation in general, or stuff 
like talking to a lawyer for whatever legal question, etc. It was also 
my understanding that use of that special budget would be discussed by 
the board for approval in a similar way to the "Strategic travel (case 
by case)" item.

All this to say, I am fine with removing this if that is the consensus 
and then we can allocate money through a board motion if/when needed.

However, if you ask me to take a firm position as treasurer then I'll 
say let's keep it but relabel it as:

"Other professional services (as/when needed, w/ board approval)"

What do you think?


There was also a question from Frank about why we'd allocate the whole 
11k$ from GSoC mentorships from 2012 to a 2013 Code Sprint support 
budget. I support this idea as that gives us a clear budget to work from 
in allocating money to code sprints, and we all seemed to agree that 
Code Sprints fit in our priorities.

However I already wrote that I expect this to be a global Code Sprint 
budget, not tied specifically to projects who had mentors in GSoC the 
previous year, and not conditinal on whether the projects in a given 
sprint participated in GSoC or not as that would be too complicated to 
deal with. I see this as a global 11k$ budget for sprints which seems 
like a fair number in the context of our overall budget.


BTW, please note that I just made a few minor changes to the budget in 
the wiki page (and sync'd with the Google spreadsheet). No numbers have 
changed, I mostly reorganized and relabelled a few items.

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Budget_2013

-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/
Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000