[LA-Policies] New conference subcommittee policy

[Chris Neugebauer]

Hi there!

tl;dr: Linux Australia has adopted a new subcommittee policy for its
conferences, in order to ensure that conferences regularly report
their budgets to the Council and membership. You can read this policy
at https://github.com/linuxaustralia/constitution_and_policies/blob/master/new_subcommittee_policy.md

Longer version:

One of the issues identified before this year's council face-to-face
meeting was a lack of council oversight of the budgeting process for
each of the conferences run under the Linux Australia umbrella.

As a result, the Council has substantially re-worked our policy for
conference subcommittees. Conference subcommittees now consist of the
people on the ground running the next conference (a "site team") and
community representatives to provide advice and oversight of the
conference organising process.

These community representatives are usually past organisers of the
conference, but can be other trusted members of the broader LA or the
Australasian Free Software & Open Source community.

At the core of the policy, conference subcommittees need to regularly
communicate their budgets and spending commitments with Council and
the membership. However, subcommittees are free to spread other roles
amongst their subcommittee as they see fit (indeed, we're already
doing this with PyCon Australia).

Some of the benefits that we expect to see from the new policy are:

* Formalising the process of conference budgeting and spending.
* Making sure that conferences report regularly to the membership.
* Formalising the roles of each conference's "Ghosts" (past
organisers) in the organisation of future conferences.

We'd like to thank all of the past and current LA conference
organisers and community members who've taken the opportunity to
provide invaluable feedback on the structure of the new policy, and
poking holes in early versions of the policy. We think the end result
is a solid and workable structure that will serve LA well.

If you'd like to read the policy, you can do so at
https://github.com/linuxaustralia/constitution_and_policies/blob/master/new_subcommittee_policy.md
,
and you can provide feedback on the policy on the new Policies mailing
list (http://lists.linux.org.au/listinfo/policies).

--Chris

-- 
--Christopher Neugebauer

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WWW: http://chris.neugebauer.id.au -- Twitter: @chrisjrn