Prospective board members: travel sponsoring.

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 09:51:35AM -0400, Rob Clark wrote:
> > > > I also think that i have not seen who has benefitted from this
> > > > sponsorship money that was spent, or the companies that they work for (i
> > > > trust that the answer to the latter is "none"). Have i missed or
> > > > overlooked this?
> > >
> > > We vote on travel approvals, it should all be in the meeting minutes.
> >
> > There is surprisingly little detail in both:
> > https://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/MeetingSummaries/2018/08-16/
> > and
> > https://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/IrcLogs/2018/08-16/
> >
> > The question of transparency comes up again here...
> >
> > "<danvet> the small extension to include all who proposed a talk (not
> > just accepted), with the wildcard to let us reject as we see fit"
> >
> > and
> >
> > "<danvet> tlwoerner, includes a "at the board's discretion" or similar
> > lingo"
> >
> > Everything of that seems to be on board@ and amazingly little of that
> > seems visible to members.
> 
> I'm not sure how you conclude that.. all I see on board@ is logistical
> related stuff (ie. submitting receipts and that sort of thing), no
> decision making.
> 
> It looks like in the end (and the treasurer can correct me if I'm
> wrong, I don't have access to the ledger), we approved travel for 6
> speakers and jake (lwn).  And we did not approve any additional travel
> sponsorship for XDC2018 after extending the travel policy[1].  This is
> all in the IRC logs and meeting minutes.

>From the Ledger records, for XDC travel reimbursement we paid LWN and
give speakers, totalling $8900.  On Dec 1st, 2018 we also paid $647.40
for a GSoC participant's travel to the GSoC Mentor Summit.

The XDC expenses were the only significant expense the last few years
(most of the rest being bank fees and random corporation expenses like
the dissolution).  Income from event sponsorships greatly exceeded
travel expenses last year.

Bryce

> [1] Although we might in future years if we have a similar situation
> of having more qualified talk submissions than slots.  And, IMHO, this
> is a good thing.. if someone has been doing some interesting work, but
> we don't have enough slots for them to present, they are still likely
> to contribute to the hallway track.
> 
> BR,
> -R
> 
> >
> > Luc Verhaegen.