On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 08:58:35PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote: > also sprach Neil McGovern <ne...@debian.org> [2015-03-20 19:39 +0100]: > > However, let me be clear: I intend on spending /more/ than that > > surplus. I would like our reserves to be at a lower level than > > they are now. > Why? What target level are you aiming for and what's the rationale?
A reasonable approach might be to set a budget for expenses as a percentage of the previous reserves (plus any explicit fundraising, eg sponsorship of debconf). SPI numbers for 2014 look something like: - earmark at 2014/01/31: ~$195k (dc14: $12k) - earmark at 2015/01/31: ~$188k (dc14/15: $32k) - non-dc14 expenses feb 2014-jan 2015: ~$40k 40k is about 21% of $190k, so just saying "we'll spend about 21% of our reserves" could be plausible. If we had a stable income, then adopting that process would lead to a steady state where reserves are about 4.8 times whatever Debian's annual income is. It looks to me like Debian's ex-debconf SPI income is somewhere in the range of $40k to $60k per annum? So if you wanted to have a reserve of $100k (ie 2x income), that would involve spending 50% of the reserve each year -- so $94k from $188k this year, $72k from $144k next year, $61k from $122k the year after etc, trending to $50k from $100k. (Note that this breaks down if you want a reserve <= annual income: it'd imply spending 100% or more of reserves. You could address that by budgetting in quarterly or monthly cycles instead of annual though. So maintaining a 40k reserve on a 40k annual income might mean maintaining a 4x reserve on a 10k quarterly budget, so each quarter you can spend 25% of the reserve, rather than each year spending 100% of the reserve) > Also, you intend to spend more than surplus, which at the moment you > could. What about next year's DPL, or the year after that? I think the above offers a reasonable approach there. Still warrants deciding what the desired ratio between income and reserves should be though. Cheers, aj -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150321054421.ga8...@master.debian.org