[Linux-aus] Candidacy Support Statement - President or Ordinary Council Member

[Kathy Reid]

Again, good question.

Linux Australia, bar one exception, has made a profit every year for the
last 6-7 years. While there are costs to keeping the organisation
running (insurance, auditors' fees, subscriptions to cloud services such
as Xero and GitHub, bank fees, costs of Council having a face to face
meeting once a year, teleconference facilities and so on), there has
generally been a surplus available. We're still in the process of
finalising our books for the 2015-2016 financial year, which ended
September 30 2016, but it's likely that LA as an organisation will again
return a profit above what it needs to run each year (which is about
$30k a year).

So, what I'm saying is that we have some cash reserves - and while we
want to maintain enough to say, run an LCA with no sponsorship if we
have to, there are sufficient funds to invest in some 'organisational
infrastructure'.

Linux Australia's entire revenue model, apart from some fractional
amount of revenue that comes from a term deposit, is generated from
event ticket sales.

So, we need to strike a balance between delivering excellent delegate
experiences at events (the extreme version of which is events run at a
loss, returning nothing to LA), and generating profits for LA (the
extreme version of which is events run at a huge profit but don't
deliver a great delegate experience). The 'optimum' point here is trying
to find the best balance / overlap between those two endpoints.

And of course, if we invest some of those profits in infrastructure - it
makes it easier to encourage membership of LA, grow the pipeline of
people who want to run open source events, and be better able to reach
those interested in attending open source events, reduce overhead on the
volunteers running events and so on.

We've had discussions in the past about other revenue sources - from say
Membership fees - but levying a fee on Members both discourages new
Members, as well as increasing expectations of what LA can provide for
Members, while at the same time generating very little revenue. For
instance let's say we had 1000 Members and they paid $20 a year in
Membership fees. That's $20k revenue, but would we have to spend more
than $20k on services and 'things' to help people feel that they were
getting value for money?  Is suspect we probably would.

I feel though that I still might not be answering your question - is
this the sort of information you were after?

Best, K.



On 26/11/16 16:20, Donna Benjamin wrote:
> That's a great list of actions. No question we need much of that to happen. 
>
> But where will the revenue come from to pay for this? 
>
> Via mobile.