Hello,
having started to regularly publish our monthly ledgers, [1] and having
published the grants page, [2] the next step is to have a regularly
published, rolling budget, which is currently in the works. The board is
currently working on optimizing the budgetting process, and here's a
first draft, based on the work of Joel, Norbert and myself.
Feedback welcome!
Florian
[1]
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/2015/06/19/publication-of-tdf-ledgers/
[2] http://www.documentfoundation.org/grant-request/
Process
Step 1: 3 Months
* Individual board members and/or staff add items to the budget “Voting”
page
* This will include all requested information including:
* Short Name;
* Description;
* Detailed enough to make us know what is going on;
* Added By;
* Owned By;
* Who will own the project if approved
* Type
* Reoccurring or One-Time Cost
* Optional: Tender yes/no [if something should be tendered
or rather not]
* Category [these might need some fine-tuning, but can always
be changed/extended later on]
* Development;
* Marketing;
* Quality Assurance;
* Infra;
* Documentation;
* UX
* Other
* Requested Amount, it should contain all costs, including VAT,
taxes, fees, postage, insurance, social security etc. -> if in doubt,
please ask Florian for details
* Optional: Man Hours [in case we tender, that might help in
comparing rates or at least getting a rough overview]
* Optional: Staff doable [in case there's a task that can
possibly be done by staff members, so it, depending on other pending
tasks, will be transformed to a staff task and the sum removed from the
budget]
* Optional: Duration [is this a longer tasks we might have to
split up to two fiscal years]
* Optional: Redmine URL [in case this is already in Redmine,
can be added later during the process when approved, of course]
Step 2: 4 Weeks (2 Meetings)
* Review all projects listed
* Add questions
* Vote Individually Prior to 2nd Meeting
* Rank: The 1-5 is flawed because there is absolutely no limit that
we put on ourselves in terms of how many 1's or 5's we give. By this
method basically someone can give everything a 5 which gives us
absolutely no information as to that person's actual preferences.
* Instead: Over the course of a quarter people add items to the
projects page. At the end of the quarter each director/deputy ranks them.
* For example if there are 15 items on the list, we give a
rank from 1-15, no repeating.
* We give ourselves 4 weeks to vote and ask questions.
Step 3: Vote
* By end of 2nd Meeting we vote – going down the list based on average
ranking
* Once we get to the first down vote, project voting ends
* Exception: If there is a low cost item that we want to specially
approve because there is the budget for it, of course this is fine.
Step 4: Organization
* Florian organizes the document
* Approved items
* Reoccurring approved items go to “Approved Reoccurring Items”
* One-Time Projects items go to “Approved One Off Projects”
* Non-Approved
* Everything else gets moved to “Non-Approved Projects”
* If the person who added it wants to put it back to projects _later_
they are more than free to do this, but at the end of voting the
projects page should be clean.
* If items are put back – all voting should be deleted as these
were ranked based on what was there, they would have to be reassessed
after new items are added again
* Redmine
* Florian + staff make tickets for any items that need one and
assigns it to the people who said they would own the projects
Step 5: Tracking and Documentation
* Whoever owns a project is responsible for keeping everyone up to date
and can be requested at any time to provide an update;
* Florian will provide an overview of the following on a regular basis
(no less than once a quarter)
* Total amount needing to be allocated by End of Year;
* Current amount allocated
* Reoccurring;
* One-Time
* Current Amount Spent
* Reoccurring;
* One-Time
* Amount Allocated but not spent
* Can discuss any concerns here and individual
directors/deputies may be requested to answer questions;
* Amount remaining
* A single amount that highlights how much we need to allocate
by end of year.
* Florian can highlight any areas where he thinks money is needed
or where we've overfunded/underfunded.
* Document will be _standardized_
* Joel more than happy to work with Florian to create a
standardized form that will be emailed out no less than once a quarter.
--
Florian Effenberger, Executive Director (Geschäftsführer)
Tel: +49 30 5557992-50 | IRC: floeff on Freenode
The Document Foundation, Kur
