[Debian-sponsors-discuss] Debian fundraising thoughts.

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 12:24:37AM +0000, Moray Allan wrote:
> >7) There is not enough continuity in the DebConf fundraising efforts,
> >as each year many of the team (who are local to the host location)
> >move on. [...]
> 
> Yes, though the counterargument to this is that the people who join
> the team for a short time do so because they are linked to a
> specific funding need, and therefore have the incentive to raise the
> required money.  We don't want to shift too far so that fundraising
> seems only someone else's problem, at least until we have many
> long-term funding agreements in place.

Right. So here is a thought on what could work, based on the (currently
correct) assumption that it is the DPL who is responsible for Debian
budget. We decide that, yearly, Debian pre-allocates some specific
amount of money to the various big spending chapters (DebConf, hw,
sprint, etc.). It is up to the DPL to decide that, and each DPL could
base their choices on the history of past choices. This is nothing new,
in terms of responsibilities; in terms of "style" it moves a bit toward
planning budgets ahead of time, pretty much as all reasonably-sized
organizations have to do.

The status quo is that we have recently started doing that for hw
replacement, thanks to DSA yearly replacement plan. But we do not do
that for DebConf: DebConf organizers are pretty much on their own for
finding the money needed to run the conference. Something like the above
would change that. (Some caution would be needed here; at the very least
the amount of money allocated to DebConf will likely need to be changed
year after year, depending on the conference location.)

The money allocated for this will be taken out of money that Debian
fundraise yearly, with no specific earmarking.

But in addition to that, we maintain the ability to do mission-specific
fundraising, e.g. for DebConf, *reusing* the same database of potential
donors that we maintain as part of yearly fundraising. That kind of
fundraising should offer benefits that are extra wrt the usual benefits
and all money raised there will be by default usable for the specific
initiative (DebConf or other).

In principle, this is not that different from what we have now. But the
goal would be to shifting the importance: the bulk of raised, and
internally redistributed, money should come from the yearly fund-raising
and not from mission-specific fund-raising (as it is currently the case,
at least for DebConf).

Still, the volunteer motivation for doing mission-specific fund-raising
will remain, as it is what will allow, say, DebConf organizers to have
extra cool (but costly) stuff at DebConfXY. What do you think?

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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