[maemo-community] Maemo Summit budget update

[From: quim.gil at nokia.com]

Hi,

I'm getting emails from some people waiting to have their sponsorship
request approved - or not. They see others have been approved after them
and are wondering what is going on.

We have a limited budget for the whole summit. Limited means that there
is enough money to organize the event but it's not flexible: if you
spend more on something it means that you need to spend less in some
other things.

At the moment there are three wildcards that are risky in accountant
terms. We ave decided not to make further steps until we have a better
idea about the real cost of each item:

- CONFIRMED SPONSORED PARTICIPANTS - There are currently 26 sponsored
participants, many of them with transatlantic flights. In most of the
cases we don't know yet what is the budget that each of them will take.
They are progressively working on the bookings and reporting back.
Booking accommodation in the center of Berlin on those dates is being
more expensive than we all thought. I hope to get all those numbers know
by Friday.

- GNOME HACKFEST - We are discussing with the GNOME project the
possibility to organize a hackfest with a maemo link, bringing together
the core developers of a certain open source upstream project. Tracker
seems to be the strongest candidate but the discussion is still ongoing
-
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/mobile-devel-list/2008-July/msg00005.html
. We need to know the amount of people that would be involved and an
estimation of the budget. I'm hoping to get these numbers by Friday.

- C-BASE - Last Thursday I met the c-base guys in Berlin. The place is
cool and the people is great. We got a common understanding of what the
summit will be in terms of rooms, equipment, services... We agred they
would send us a budget by Friday.

This means that those waiting for an answer will need to wait probably
until Friday. In the meantime we have approved some cases, those tat
were totally clear (e.g. Thoughtfix) and even pre-agreed (3 guys of INdT
- we pay travel and they cover their accommodation). We are also
approving some cases that are not just clear but also relatively
affordable (e.g. Florian and Nils from Germany). Most of the pending
requests come from USA and Brazil.

Note that many requests have been rejected, some of them more recent
that many requests still waiting for a decision. Those waiting are
waiting because they do have still a chance, depending on the budget
available.

August 1st is my mental deadline for the sponsorship program. The
registration tool will still allow sponsorship requests but only big
exception should go through, unless a finantial miracle happens and
other parts get much more cheaper than they look now. 

--
Quim Gil
marketing manager, open source
maemo software @ Nokia