Re: [gentoo-nfp] Delegating project expenses to Council

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 10:00:32AM -0700, Alec Warner wrote:
> Hello Nonprofit folks,
>
> In a recent Council meeting, the council agreed to take on the duties
> of vetting project-spending. The Foundation nominally has two types of
> spending:
>
>  - Mandatory spending. These are things like phone, mail, taxes,
> accounting, etc. This spending will remain in direct control of the
> board. This spending is used to keep the *foundation* alive (note it
> has nothing to do with Gentoo the project in any way.) Eventually we
> would like to see the Foundation replaced by an umbrella, in which
> case this spending would be replaced by fees paid to the umbrella
> company.
>  - Project spending. Pretty much anything not mandatory at this point.
> Note this includes infrastructure spending. So hardware, servers,
> reimbursements, posters, etc.
I think some clarity around "Project" is needed here. Where do some of
these fall? Into the "project" sense that evolved from ebuild herds, vs
as a "task" conducted by a group of people.

Various groupings of expenditure that stand out from Bugzilla [1]
- Infra CapEx (new/replacement server & parts we own somewhere)
- Infra OpEx (rented servers)
- Development servers, CapEx & OpEx [e.g. catbus.sparc, new $ARCH]
- PR OpEx: consumables, e.g. flyers, DVDs
- PR CapEx: re-usable banners
- PR OpEx: GSOC reimbursements
- ?? NitroKey "project" (OpEx per accountant)
- ?? Memorial donations (fmccor, avenj, ??)

None of these are mandatory spending, but they all have various degrees
of paperwork and complexity. The PR consumables are frequently very
short deadlines, because they get left to the last minute.

Historically, Infra has an unofficial annual budget of $1K for
replacement parts, that didn't include any of the OpEx (Hetzner, AWS).
- Past that budget point, funding approvals were needed. Is that likely
  to stay the same?
- Would other projects have baseline budgets in the same way?

> I'm looking for feedback from the community and the board on this as
> we will change the board procedure if the board votes to make these
> changes (we have not yet voted.)
>
> The ultimate goal is to operate a more of an arms-length arrangement
> with the Foundation; the eventual outcome being that the Foundation
> will cease to exist at some point and be replaced by an arms-length
> umbrella holding company.
To what degree/spending level will the approval of BOTH bodies be
required? E.g. Sparc project wants to spend $50K on a top-of-the-line
Oracle server.

> Do you think this is a good idea?
Overall yes, because it prepares the council to take on ownership of
budgetary control in the larger organization.

> Are there more than 2 buckets of spending?
Do the OpEx & CapEx spending need seperation?

> Looking forward to your feedback,
Further discussion: I think process improvements are needed regardless:
The funding requests/discussion should wind up in SEPARATE bugs than any
confidential details, so that the confidential parts [2] can be locked
rather than public. 

Does the entire Council need to know some of that PII, or just the
treasurer handling the reimbursements?

[1] 
Search all bugs for "finance" in the bug whiteboard, which is part of a
set of tags I used as part of the financial auditing I did. This list
has 96 bugs in total, of which 22 are private, most frequently because
they contain PII.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=5857395&order=bug_id&query_format=advanced&status_whiteboard=finance&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr

[2] PII such as shipping addresses, payment addresses, names of
non-developers, as well as business details like things from some
sponsors.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Dev, Infra Lead, Foundation Treasurer
E-Mail   : robbat2@g.o
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