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 _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list