Minutes for Meeting of February 25, 2009

We do not have good minutes for our meeting on February 25th. However, we discussed the 2009 budget for a good part of the meeting. Here are some notes from that part of the conversation.

Expected Income for 2009:

• $120K adboard fees
• $20K friends of GNOME (projected)
• specific fundraising for programs
• Total: $140K (projected, not actual)

Surplus to spend: (We have an amount of money in the bank. We save some of it in case income doesn't meet expectations but we can also spend some of it.)

• We have about $110K (not counting money earmarked for accessibility)
• J5 suggests getting that down to $50K (Stormy thinks that would be low)
• That would give us an extra $60K

So our budget is approximately $190K plus specific fundraising.

Expected expenses:

• $123K (Salaries)
• $44K (Travel + bonuses)
• $62K (community development, marketing, legal, 10% of hackfest costs, bank charges)

BALANCE:

• -$39K

So we either need to raise $39K more or we need to cut costs.

We should tackle this from two angles. Fundraising and cutting expenses.

• If we got four more corporate sponsors by GUADEC, that would cover this. Stormy has several that are strong potentials and a list of further potentials.
• Use the Friends of GNOME fundraising for a sys admin. For example, we could say if we get 400 subscribers (one for every member of the Foundation) we'll hire a sys admin. That'd be more than enough. (Thinking a partime sys admin is $35-40K, can anyone confirm?)
• At the same time, we should figure out what we will cut if we don't get four corporate sponsors by GUADEC. (Which seems tough.)
  • Stormy's bonus.
  • Some of Stormy's travel fund (couldn't save much more than $5-7K at this point).
  • Some of the community travel fund? (We have $5K more allocated for travel requests this year than last year.)
• Figure out and count on a surplus from GUADEC? Expecting a surplus of €24.