Summits, Conferences and Meetups workgroup - 2020-03-03

! just came back

google reminds me that we have a meeting in 5

!

hi all

so who is here?

nobody it seems

I

yeah

Oh

Ok let's start then

1. Agenda

There's nothing on trello but there WIP items, we can go over those

Guus, do you want to update us on the flyers? ✏

I don't have any updates on that.

other than what I shared here.

Okay

Sprints then

fwiw i like everything that has been produced so far

thank you Guus for handling that

yep :)

2. Supporting sprints

i didn’t even mind the 'stockieness' of the latest one

(didn’t get a chance to say that when you originally posted that)

So, following the thread on the list, I'd like us to settle on a proposal. I've integrated feedback in the one I sent already

let me copy paste it in a pad somewhere so we have it clearly

I'm in favor of spending limited amounts on sprints, as suggested. We do need to find a way to get the movement of money happen. Currently, our bank account is in the states, and transferring money takes quite some effort, and is somewhat costly (which, offsetted against the relatively low costs for sprints, would make things expensive)

the xsf could just get transferwise or something

also, I'd like to not overburden the treasurer with many, small requests, like having every participant reimburse their own bit.

Sure, but that's not free either, right?

no the idea was that the organizer sends one invoice

Guus, it is not. but way cheaper than regular bank transfer

My understanding (maybe wrong) is that you loose relatively a lot when transferring smaller amounts?

ok, happy to be wrong on that then.

i can look that up again but i think transferwise is always %

Guus, what would you suggest otherwise? That we get a bank also in Europe?

vs regular wire transfer which is always like 20 bucks or so

or 40

pep. Setting up a bank account in Europe (or at least in the Netherlands) for an organization is deceptively hard.

There are many anti-fraud rules to abide by. I tried doing that for Ignite, but decided against it for the sheer amount of work involved.

What about asking organizations like SPI (https://spi-inc.org) who would explicitely handle that for us

(eg, we had to have individual officers show up, in person, at either the bank or a local consulate)

but yes we can make it an additional rule that there is only one reimburstment

And also free some time for peter

(i kinda thought that was obvious; but doesn’t hurt to make it explicit)

https://mensuel.framapad.org/p/9fcf-sprints-re2q sorry for people on mobile

I suggest that we discuss the vehicle for payment with the XSF Treasurer

I'm sure that we can make something happen.

I don't think we have to make it a rule that there is only one person expensing things, but we can indeed mention that's how we would prefer it

I'm not familiar with SPI - maybe that's a good way - but maybe Peter doesn't mind the extra work at all.

but we are in general agreement that what pep. wrote down in the email and on the pad is what we want to do, right?

do we need an official vote?

or can we just go ahead and publish that

Who's budget is this coming from?

SCAM

Then we're pretty limited.

1000 USD per year.

We can put a hard limit on the number of events we're going to sponsor

well with 100-150 per sprint and ~6 sprints a year we are fine for now

And we can get an agreement from board that they'd extend it if necessary for N more events maybe

But I do think we're fine for now

Also, I do want to raise this with board before the XSF / SCAM commits to this.

the SCAM budget is also used for other stuff 🙂

stickers, swag, etc. If we're going to have 6 sprints/year, there's little budget left for that.

Not that much, but yeah ~

we could ask for more budget, or we could ask for it to not come from SCAMs budget in the first place

I'll submit that to board for this week then

Why do we want to take it from SCAMs budget? Seems like an additional hoop / bookkeeping to do to me, with little benefit?

i'd prefer that we use up our budget and than have a reason to get our budget raised

hmm I might not be here at this time. that'll depend again on weather and the state of my legs :x

Guus, I don't have any preferences

Just that we're SCAM

let's put that question to board. I'm fine with either, but going not through SCAM seems easier to me.

would that mean that board has to vote on every sprint?

i'd prefer us doing that

same here

Oh, no.

I definitely do not want to have board vote on sprints

i mean if you are worried about sprints cutting too much in our swag budget i'm fine with limiting to 4 sprints for now or whatever

i just want to get started asap

are we going to explicitly vote on each/

i think we (scam) should vote

k

seems sensible

I think we should as well. We kinda have to see if the event fits our requirements

I still think that we could ask for board to allow us to do that, and for the money spent not to come out of SCAMs budget.

yeah. i'm not really expecting us to say no a lot. but there has to be some oversight

We might also want to set meetings for when something is proposed?

(I need to go soon)

k

but then let's write down an actual proposal (without todos)

a monthly cadence of meetings should work with 4 to 6 sprints per year?

because board needs something that has no todos to vote on

right

i mean a lot of the TBDs seem obvious to us

budget based on participant count or event?

participant count might be hard to 'prove'

(although seems more fair)

maybe event with minimum amount of participants? Something like 4?

I suggest we go without a minimum for now. I'm happy to review once we get some more experience

i suggest we only start to build in abuse prevent once we have a reason to suspect people are abusing it

We should not have one-participant events getting money 🙂

(re proving participant count)

but yes minimum count might make sense

Also because there isn't anything saying you shouldn't do this and that doesn't mean we can't refuse

it'd be good to define a bit of framework, that we can later use if something is challenged.

Things involving money tend to get dirty fast. It'd be good to define a rule against which we measure things, if only very broad.

Some kind of minimum participant count, as well as a fixed budget would be enough for me

fixed budget?

ok. then we say that participants must be registered on the wiki

they have been in the past anyway

pep. like 100 euro per event, that has at least 4 participants.

(I'm open to different numbers)

registration on the wiki works for me.

i'd still like a per participant amount

Do you prefer this because of what you said above? That it'd be hard to find out the exact count?

instead of 100 euro flat fee

same here

but i'm fine with having a 4 minuim

so it's not just me and pep. having diner in dresden

4 also seems fine to me

I think flat fees would be a lot simpler. Less debate about how many people were there, etc.

not a hill for me to die on though

If it's ok with you I'd like to see how it works for the first few requests we get

i get the simpler. but for example in stockholm 100 euro wouldn’t have been enough

for the ~10 people or so

TBH I don't think we're going to get a lot of them

daniel I'm fine by not covering all costs perse. This is just sponsoring, not financing 🙂

I had a cap at 150EUR as a suggestion in the proposal

That's about what we spent for 10 (a bit less iirc)

Where does the money go that is not spent?

i'm ok with a cap of 150. but giving a group of 4 and a group of 10 the same amount doesn’t feel right

Guus, it's just not expensed

We don't give them 150, they ask up to 150

daniel, yeah

ah, that's more elaborate. I thought we'd just give an amount, and not bother with having invoices,e tc.

(which is part of the reason I was aiming a bit lower)

Ok. That's always how I've been doing events / expenses

So maybe we also need to specify that

As it doesn't seem to seem obvious

to be

I'm not hearing anything that I wildly disagree with, btw. If you guys feel strongly about a per person instead of per event fee, I'd be ok with that.

I do need to go now. Can we wrap up?

yep, seems ok to me

yes

I'll summarize all that, send an email to scam and add an agenda item for board

I might not be present this week for board though

Thanks all

ok, thanks!

Next is +1 month as usual. April 7th

wfm