[LGM] Fwd: Re: Greetings from London

[Michael Schumacher]

Hi all,

please find here the mail exchange Femke and I had with Louis about LGM
funding after our first meeting during this LGM.

Please note that the meeting notes got relocated and are now available
at https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/LGM_Funding_Notes

Louis' mail is the message mentioned around line 58 of these notes.


Regards,
Michael

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Greetings from London
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2016 20:07:21 -0400
From: Louis Desjardins <louis.desjardins at gmail.com>
To: Michael Schumacher <schumaml at gmx.de>
CC: Femke Snelting <snelting at collectifs.net>

Hi Femke and Michael,

It’s great to have news from you!

It’s a real pity I am not there but I could not help it. Last year I
moved my business to another location and the whole operation had to be
done during the very week of the LGM, no chance. There was simply no way
out. My lease was finishing and no overlap between old and new location.
I would have had to clone myself... This year it’s worse. My dad's heath
condition is very bad and my mom is fading away trying to do more than
she can. We have to help both our parents. I could not leave. And if
that would not be enough, this time of the year is also very busy at the
office. I wouldn’t have been able to make even by teletransportation.

I am going to write here some notes to help you out figuring what can be
done.

I realize after writing it that it is quite long but please read me
because I have put many informations and a path to a solution, maybe.

Some questions that would also need to be answered, even if this seems
obvious. At least to document the case.

   1. Why would we want to be involved so much with the funding?
   2. What would be the drawbacks or consequences (for real) of LGM not
   funding the travels fees?
   3. Who would be concerned to the point of not coming to LGM?
   4. Would that expose LGM to a threat? Which threat and to what extent?
   Something we can deal with or something we can’t?
   5. I think those questions are valid and should be raised, maybe
through a poll.
   6. For one thing, GIMP devs have their expenses covered by their own
   money.
   7. Some other people have asked one or two times and then found local
   ways to fund their trips.
   8. Some, I know, could have never make it without LGM funding.
   9. Basically, to what extent would quitting the funding and all the
hard work that comes with it would affect LGM. This is a hard question
but it needs to be answered in the best possible way, no feelings.
   10. If the answer, in every aspects and with lots of nuances leads us
to believe it would harm LGM not to fund its speakers, then we can have
a close look at what is involved further down the road.

We already use an organisation that is legally constituted in Québec.
It’s a non-profit but it has no status of "charity" so it cannot produce
receipts that someone could use to reduce its income tax. However, it’s
a possibility that we do it in the future but I have had not time to
deal with the paperwork. Mind you, it’s not that complicated to ask and
to get but it can take a few months before we actually can produce any
such receipts.

That said, this legal entity has no possibility to extent outside the
Canadian boundary it’s "charity" advantages. For this, we would need an
organisation in each country (maybe Europe would allow us to have only
one entity for the whole EU but we’d have to find out). We would need
one in the USA and then one in many countries. So, from the perspective
of donators who are individuals, no matter where the organisation
establishes its home, there will be issues with all the "foreigners" to
that country.

However, provided the donations are small amounts, it’s not really an
issue but it’s better to understand the process that not. Some countries
might accept a receipt provided by an organisation from another country
in their annual income report. The new org or the actual one could still
send receipts outs and it would be up to each person to find out in its
own jurisdiction. This, clearly, would be totally out of the control of
the organisation, no matter what it is.

There are a few issues that make the reimbursement process in some cases
very long. However, I believe this is not the majority of the cases.
Usually, provided we have the right info on the first place, the process
is smooth. Here is a list of the obstacles in the process.

   - One is my own availability. The window is short for me and as soon
as we have something wrong in the process, recovering the time can be
   difficult. For many of the reimbursements, I have been able to
fulfill them. Some are really troublesome.
   - Despite my own time limitation, the most difficult is to get the
   proper documents. It seems easy, but in fact it isn’t. Because we
have to deal with accounting rules that oblige us to balance to the
penny, we need the proper documents showing the proper information.
   - Dealing with various currencies, that vary every minute (no jokes),
is a challenge. Sometimes, using the bank internet facilities led to an
afternoon spent to simply have a stable currency rate for the
transaction with the currency involved.
   - Sometimes we have to wait a day or two and this can lead to weeks
of waiting because the transactions, although doable on the Internet,
are limited to bank hours when currency rates are involved. This is true
with banks, not with Paypal.
   - Some people are asking for money in a currency that is not
supported by our bank (they don’t have a reliable intermediary bank at
the location — some African countries are in that case).
   - Receipts are in a currency and people need a reimbursement in another.
   - There are cases where the currency of a country goes down so
quickly and so low that in respect to the people who bought a plane
ticket at a price, we cannot reimburse at the rate that prevails on the
day of the reimbursement. The info is available but we have to find it
and then document properly for the accounting.
   - Receipts are made in the name of someone else than the name of the
   person we are to reimburse, or to an organisation which name don’t
show on the receipt.
   - We have to comply with the bank rules that ask for personal infos
such as name and address + bank account and name and address of bank and
of intermediary bank. Sometimes info is simply missing. Or there is a typo.
   - When people ask for Paypal, it’s faster and much simpler. However
this is a minority.
   - Bank draft are supposed to be fine but lately we had an issue with
   someone who could not cash it. Then, getting only the facts — why the
bank is refusing to cash a bank draft at the other end — is difficult.
Phone calls to the bank, discussions, emails... Time consuming!
   - Bank wire are safe but they cost 35 USD or EUR and there are also
fees at the receiver end. I get complaining emails. What can I do?
   - Receipts are sometimes not acceptable as they don’t show the basic
   infos we need : date, name, amount, what is it, currency. It can be
tricky.
   People make mistakes. Sometime they send the receipts for another
   conference — the dates don’t match! It can lead to many back and
forth communications before we settle the case.
   - Some people ask for amounts that are close to the cost of the bank
   fees and they don’t want us to use Paypal.
   - In some countries post services are not reliable and drafts don’t
   arrive! We have ways to cancel them but it is again time consuming.
We have to go physically to the bank, provide the documents, fill forms,
wait...
   Time consuming.
   - It happens that wire transfers are never deposited in the target
   account and are shipped back after months in total blindness of both
the sender and the receiver. When we find out, the process must be
restarted from the begining but we don’t know if it will succeed in the end.

To keep the costs as low as possible, I have done the work myself and
never asked any employee to do it for me. This decision of mine was
certainly driven by good sentiment but "business wise", it was not good
because everybody is relying on my own personnal availability. This of
course could change. It would not be that difficult to put together and
it would not cost a high price considering the benefits.

With that said, I can say that I now understand much better why the
GNOME Foundation was so slow at reimbursements, even when the paperwork
was done completely by us. Retrospectively, they were probably not doing
such a bad job. Only, it seems so easy from the outside (shame on me, I
was one of the heaviest complainer) that it’s hard to understand that
there are so many steps we need to do to accomplish the job. And it’s
hard to understand just how complicated it can be, when things don’t go
right on the first place.

There is no evidence that any organisation we would put together would
not face the same issues. I thought that we would do better than GNOME
only to discover that in fact, no. It’s not only in the hands of the
organisation, it’s the people, the documents, the bank system, the
currencies, the rates, the means used to transfer the money, the
communications.

I have no opinion about using such or such organisation. I thought after
Brussels we could use Constant because the organisation had staff and
was strong but obviously that is not going to happen. Then, the door is
closed on GNOME. In my view, if we are to get out of AQDPLL, GNOME
seemed to me a good candidate but again this door is closed. So,
creating a new entity?
One could ask, why? Why don’t we use what we have already and tweak it
to our needs? What do we need?

Some historical facts : in Lyon, the budget was from GNOME and a couple
sponsors and many participants were simply not sponsored to be there.
Dave Neary told be he paid almost everyone in cash. In Montreal, I put
together AQDPLL because we needed a legal entity to be sponsored by the
government and we needed it to be able to make invoices to the corporate
world. By the way, for them, the invoice is perfect. It’s an expanse
that is 100% deductible from there income so they pay no tax on the
money they give and they need no return as well because it’s money
before the bottom line. This works no matter where you are in the world.
There are no limitations unless we reach higher numbers in the
non-profit. AQDPLL was supposed to live a year but then we had the issue
with Poland and the money stuck there for months. I personnally took the
responsibility of clearing that issue out and finally got the money from
Poland to GNOME. Then Montreal 2009 and it went so bad (we thought) with
GNOME that we decided to take the responsiblity of the reimbursement
back. Then 2010, Brussels. Everything was handled properly by Constant,
no problem. Then Montreal again and from then on AQDPLL handled the
reimbursements. Some money had to be handled directly by the local teams
during that whole period. Especially when we
could benefit from public subsidies like when in Madrid, for some
participants. AQDPLL didn’t handle that part of the money.

Apart from Montreal 2007, and certainly Brussels 2010 (because of OIF
and EU funding) the budget was always quite low. We handle something
between 10-15k per year.

My take on that is as long as we’re going to be in those low digits,
it’s going to be questionable whether or not we need an entity of our
own to cope with the reimbursements and the gathering of the money. I
think we need not to have opinions here but simply do the hardest work :
gather the facts and decide upon them. They will be guiding us. Not me
or you or anybody else in the room. The facts. What money? What for?
Here is an attempt at gathering the facts through the questions below.
The answers to those questions will guide our decision.

Will create a new legal entity solve any issue we have? How. Please explain.

What would be the goals?

Who would be in charge? Elections? Paid personnel? How do we hire them?
Again, who’s in charge?

At what cost?

Which country would we pick as a home and why?

What would be the annual budget?

How would we be financed?

How could this make us gather enough money ahead of LGM in order to make
sure we have enough money to cover a moving target in terms of
reimbursement needs?

What follows is not a formal proposal, of course. It may help us narrow
down the issue and will also help us get out of the loop of the actual
way of funding/reimbursing for the time of the discussion. What will
come out of it, I don’t know. But I prefer to raise the idea and see
what benefits could come out of it than stick in the actual debate on
structures and raising corporate money with such difficulties.

Would you like to follow me for a minute on another path? :-)

How do people react to the possibilty of asking for a reasonable fee to
enter LGM? Member pay lower fee. Non member and corporate people pay
more. Student pay little. How much could that be as compared to other
conference?
What could we expect? We need to do some math here. Say, to be a LGM
member, as a student (we need to control this) you pay for instance 50 EUR.
Member that is not a student pays 100 EUR per year. Non member pay 200
EUR to attend (more?). Some conf have fees, such as PYCON.

https://us.pycon.org/2016/registration/

Say we have 150 people that distributes as such: Students 30.
Individuals 110. Corporate 10. According to PYCON fees we would gather
the following
budget:

   - 30 students x $125 = 3750
   - 110 individual x $350 = 38 500
   - 10 corporate x $600 = 6000
   - TOTAL : 48 250 $

150 people or so is (if I remember well) the ball park figures for an LGM.
Sometimes we have lots more, sometimes we have less. But let’s keep that
number for the sake of the discussion. We can also play with the fees.
PYCON is way bigger than LGM and for that reason their fees are at that
height. We could have lower fees.

That’s nearly 50k when needs have once approached 30k and usually are
kept to 15k. This means that no matter the year, we would still have
some money left. And we would know the budget ahead of time or at least
on the day 1 of LGM. And we would be confident of being able to
reimburse 100% of the travel expenses.

That way, we could rely on money for a couple years ahead, plan for
further destinations, including pay for facilties like in Singapore when
needed. We could spare some money on a long awaited LGM report to try to
raise money from the corporate world.

I don’t wan to sound histerical but I trust this idea should be raised
and discussed thoroughly at LGM and in the coming weeks.

To me, the organisation has to come after the thinking on how to raise
funds and for what reason.

With as little a budget as 10-15k per year, I see no real benefit at
starting an LGM Foundation. If the money is near 50k, it’s still not
large figures but it’s a start. And with such a structure we might also
interest more donations from government. It’s better to have members
that pay their share and then ask for support than to be in the position
of not asking anything to the attendance but ask for public money
nonetheless.

Recurrent subsidies would also be a strong benefit that could arise from
this new way. And we would not push away people. We could also have
grants for the ones in need.

Some more numbers:

   - 30 students x 75$ = 2250 $
   - 110 individual x 250$ = 27 500 $
   - 10 corporate x 400$ = 4000 $
   - TOTAL : 33 750 $

Even then, it’s more than what we have been spending every year.

FSF has a membership fee. Average is 169 $. Multiplied by 150 people: 25
350 $. This is a bit short of what would seem to me comfortable but we
could imagine having more members than 150...

Also, having annual membership would put pressure on us to give more to
the members, between LGMs. A better website, with more aggregation of
resources, maybe a publication? etc. Plus, this membership would take
away the pressure on local teams that have to pay sometimes out of their
pocket for t-shirt, printing, etc.

Anyway, this is enough for tonight.

I realise I should have structured this in a better way. But the data is
there. If you need me to further explain or better organise the above
infos, don’t hesitate to let me know.

In a late attempt to summarise:

   - Do we need to take the responsibility of the travel fees of the
   speakers and other heavy collaborators to projects at LGM?
   - If yes, can we consider seriously to have an annual membership fee
   (some devs could have this paid by their own org if they wish)?
   - If yes we need to fund people but no we don’t want to have a
   membership fee, then how do we raise money from a) the corporate
world, b) the public organisations and c) our community?
   - How much money do we need yearly and how this budget make the
creation of another entity necessary?
   - We need answers to the questions raised in the above summary (and
to extended questions raised throughout the long text above) before
making a decision.

A membership would also make people accept maybe more the importance of
LGM and take away the side-effect of people who seem to ask for money to
make a good trip around the world.

The more I think of it, the more I think it’s an idea to dig.

I won’t be able to attend an IRC meeting tomorrow. Hence my 2-cents here.
Please share it. I can attend IRC meeting during lunchtime between 12
and 14. Wednesdays are ok. Otherwise, I am ok with Saturdays and
Sundays, as long as the meeting doesn’t last more than 2 hours!

Thanks again for writing me! I would have loved to be with you!
Hopefully I can make it in Rio next year.

Louis



2016-04-17 16:26 GMT-04:00 Michael Schumacher <schumaml at gmx.de>:

> Hi Louis,
>
> LGM 2016 is as great as any of the previous conferences, and it is such a
> pity you're not here with us. We've got interesting talks, the participants
> are getting incredible amount of stuff done and are having a good time as
> well.
>
> Following up on a proposal by Nate, which was presented in a talk at LGM,
> we discussed several options for future LGM funding, the challenges
> involved and the services that are required. Asking an established
> third-party organisation to handle it for us is one of the options.
>
> We want you to part of the discussion and included in this process that
> has started here. You can find the meeting notes at
> https://etherpad.net/p/LGM_Funding_Notes
>
> We are also writing this mail to thank you for your years of organizing
> and handling the LGM funding. As many people involved in this sort of task
> will agree with, it is never an easy thing to do. We see this as an
> essential part of future LGM organizational effort, and this is why we see
> a need for changes.
>
> There is need to move fast, as this can take a significant amout of time
> to complete. LGM 2017 is about a year away, and the organizers need the
> confidence to be able to create yet another great experience for everyone.
>
> The immediate step is to come up with an action plan during LGM. We
> scheduled a follow-up meeting for tomorrow. Further steps include the plans
> to reach a decision in June and have everything in place by October, always
> pending approval in the previous step, of course.
>
>
>
> All the best,
> Femke & Michael