Budget work

Committees Marketing
1

All:

After some thinking and some offline discussions, I'd like us to
continue to try to work on a VisCom budget. Our group is almost
certainly the most "expensive" of the various committees we have, and we
need much more financial transparency than we have had to date. The
Board is going this way, and we should too. For the time being, it may
be that our money still comes from ADSK -- but we need to make sure we
treat it as "our" money, as the supply is not unlimited and we will need
to stand on our own next year.

My understanding is that the Foundation budget page
(http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Budget_2006-2007) is really a goal for
CY07, and dependent on our fundraising efforts. Our future Executive
Director will be of great help in this effort, but until he/she is
annointed and crowned, let us try to get the ball rolling. I'd like to
focus initially on our costs for the rest of CY06.

Frank has informally given me a number of 15K to work with; this is not
an official number, just an idea of where we should be at. I have
updated the VisCom page (http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/VisComBudget)
with some idea for the 2006 needs.

To complete this exercise, we really need the following info:

  (1) costs of logo/branding work
   
  (2) costs of discretioanry swag to date

  (3) list of what shows for us to be at remain for 2006

  (4) list of expenses per show (as much as possible) for our events to
date

I can handle (1) and (2). I'd like volunteers for (3) and (4) -- I'm
thinking specifically of Lisa and Tyler and Seven, but I won't mention
any names.

-mpg

2

  (1) costs of logo/branding work

  (2) costs of discretioanry swag to date

  (3) list of what shows for us to be at remain for 2006

  (4) list of expenses per show (as much as possible) for our events to
date

I will do what I can, but I think it can be a bottomless hole to try to enumerate all the costs. e.g. the platinum sponsorship for OSCON cost $60k, but that isn't from our OSGeo budget (though it is from Autodesk's internal promo budget, I'm sure). And Autodesk event/marketing staff too have done a lot that we would normally have to pay for. So these are, essentially, significant 'sponsored' events that may be something OSGeo ends up wanting to do directly, or they may be one or two time events to get started, etc. etc.

I guess it would be helpful to know what it did cost for things, including internal and external/sponsor costs, but how far do you go? Ultimately if we have a good reason for funding an idea, we should pull the costs together and see if we can make it happen. Knowing what it did cost doesn't mean we'll do it the same way at the same cost in the future... so how can we guess ahead of time? I think we need to dream big and then define the cost and see if the money is there. We know the order of magnitude is going to be within the 10's of 1,000's and less than 100k for any given event - is that enough of a range to define things?

Perhaps you are just generally wondering what different aspects to the events cost on their own? I.e. printing, booth material/setup, sponsorships, etc?

Tyler