[maemo-community] Organizing Maemo Summit 2009

[From: Sebastian 'CrashandDie' Lauwers]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Quim Gil <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
> Actually you are touching (involuntarily?) an interesting point.

Dammit.

> Who organizes the Maemo Summit 2009? Is it Nokia with the help of the
> Maemo community or the other way round? This is not a half-full/empty
> discussion:

I agree, I was hoping someone would address this question before I
did. The way I see it, is that Nokians who are on the Maemo project
can actually commit time to managing this. The time constraint on
these kind of events is a lot more important. I can't take an
afternoon off to call venues. And they don't like working on weekends.

> In 2008 Nokia organized with the help of the community, I was acting as
> benevolent dictator in most decisions and all the budget and payments
> went through our planning and execution.

The other thing is that Nokia has the administrative platform to
actually support these kind of operations, which is something Maemo
does not. I'm not saying we can't manage a budget, I'm just saying
that having people crunching through the numbers and approving it will
be easier if Nokia remains in the picture. I wouldn't mind seeing
budget proposals going through in both directions.

> Do you expect just the same this year or would you prefer to have a
> community driven committee (with people from Nokia volunteering but not
> deciding alone) that would agree the sponsorship fund with Nokia and go
> away with the execution?

Again, I don't know if anyone would dare taking on such a
responsibility. Also, even though the idea displays how much you (as a
Quim, the human, not Nokia) trust the community, I'm not sure Nokia,
as a corporate entity, would assign the same level of trust. If the
community and Nokia can achieve a consensus on budgeting, execution
should follow suit smoothly. I do not wish to see money go through
anyone's hands in the community. Nokia's budget should go directly to
the end-entity payees, eg hotels/venues. Sponsoring indivials is
another problem.

Talking about this other problem, by the way, I noticed last time that
a few people were having expenses reimbursement issues. Now, in my
company, the employee pays for everything (excepted travel, which is
done booked/paid by our assistant/company credit card), and then
submit expense reports which need approval, they then get reimbursed
on a date at the discretion of our administrative people. I also
understand some people were having a hard time paying for the expenses
first, and waiting for reimbursement. As most sponsored people will
not be Nokians, I think it is only fair to assume that we should try
to polish this procedure just a bit.

Do you think it is possible to have Nokia book/pay for travels
beforehand, as this would take away a big chunk of the money people
will have to produce? Same idea for hotels. This will also allow for
more fine-grained bookings, and even better, maybe even get reductions
(if Nokia books 20 people in a hotel for 5 nights, it's a lot easier
to ask for a %). This does raise an issue though. If someone got
sponsorship but couldn't make it, Nokia didn't incur any costs,
whereas in this scenario, money would be plainly wasted.

> In any case I think you care about how much money we spent sponsoring or
> paying food, chairs, and etc since from a Nokia point of view all comes
> from a same intial budget agreed. If we agree on 100€ then someone (not
> Nokia) will need to decide whether 10% or 90% goes to sponsor people.

Agreed. I think Nokia should still have a say, and possibly give
unformal approval of how the budget will be managed (I think Nokia
will always have an opinion, we could get a luxurious hotel and
sponsor 3 guys, or sleep in the streets and cause an immigration
problem, and that opinion should be heard). But yes indeed, I think it
would be very interesting to see some figures, only to have a very
rough overview of what needs to be done, and what kind of decisions we
are talking about.

Figures lie, and liers figure :)


-- 
question = ( to ) ? be : ! be;
      -- Wm. Shakespeare