[Linux-aus] Council Meeting 2011-02-17

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Anthony Towns <aj at erisian.com.au> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 10:52, John Ferlito <johnf at inodes.org> wrote:
>>> Yes, I appreciate that. For grants, LA requires a proposal, a clear
>>> statement of how it benefits Linux in Australia (or some other
>>> aspect of LA's goals), and public discussion, and limits the maximum
>>> amount to $1000, the idea being that that way there doesn't need to
>>> be too much review because not too much money is at risk.
>> Is that written down somewhere?
>
> Not that I can find easily. The most recent statement in my mail logs
> is a post by Jon to the committee list dated 24th Jan 2007, which
> said:
>
>>>> Our budget for the Grant Scheme is $2000 / month, ie: $24,000 / year.
>>>> Our expectation when starting the scheme was that we would probably
>>>> approve 2 grants per month on average of about $1000 each, with some
>>>> being for larger amounts and some for smaller. In 2006 we approved only
>>>> 5 grants with a total value of $6750, which is far fewer than we had
>>>> expected and is a little disappointing. On the other hand, the requests
>>>> that did come through were generally of a very high quality and well
>>>> worthy of Linux Australia's support.
>
>> While I don't disagree at all with the
>> process above, if it is in fact the process then we've already broken
>> it at least twice in terms of the size of grants given in the last 12
>> months. At least two of these exceeded $1,000.
>
> Right. I don't think there's been a problem with grants over the past
> year; that's been as good as it's ever managed to be. On the other
> hand, there's also some history of council pet projects having much
> less review than projects proposed by members.
>
>> I'll add a TODO to the council's F2F work to write up a similar
>> policy for grants along with all the other policy work we are
>> currently undertaking.
>
> Huh? There's already a grants policy; and it's not really a lack of
> policies that's the problem.


This whole thing is not about grants, but about donations IIUC. I
think John got the wording wrong. If it was a grant, then the ADA
initiative would have gone through the process. But it wasn't the Ada
Initiative asking for money, it was LA offering money to help them get
started. So, donations still require a new policy - if the council
decides a cause worthy of donating to, what are they allowed to do.
Basically, as it stands right now, they are allowed to do anything -
and in fact they have always made the decision to donate $10K to the
LCA dinner cause without ever needing to ask membership to be allowed
to do so. Committees in the past have likely made many more monetary
decisions without consulting the membership. But I, too, agree that
there should be some process/policy for such things.

Silvia.