Board voting ends today, but...

[Stephane Marchesin]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 13:45, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 01:33:36PM -0800, Stephane Marchesin wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 05:44, Luc Verhaegen <libv at skynet.be> wrote:
>> > There is little to no information about the X.org Foundation Boards
>> > financial handlings. Several years ago, several companies (at least one,
>> > Sun) deposited a lot of money into the foundation. It seems that the
>> > foundation had 222k usd at the start of 2007; and we have 125k usd
>> > today. We are not getting many details on how these funds were used, and
>> > we only get some very general statements about how these funds were used
>> > in the last year. And it seems that nobody on the actual board of
>> > directors has anything but some hazy ideas of what is going on.
>>
>> FWIW a fair chunk of that money went into XDS 2007. If you recall we
>> had a nice conference place and X.Org paid for hosting and trip for a
>> big number of people (which is also why the event grew so big and was
>> so successful, we never had such a big venue before and since then).
>
> ***********************************************************************
> * THIS IS ONLY MY RECOLLECTION FROM A TWO-MINUTE SCAN OF EMAIL.       *
> * DO NOT TAKE IT AS GOSPEL, DO NOT RELY UPON IT AS ABSOLUTE TRUTH.    *
> ***********************************************************************
>
> As far as I can tell (and I've not looked hard, because I'd like to
> escape the office early), XDS 2007 cost $US10k for the venue, around
> $US24k for travel sponsorship (no joke), and something like $US5k lost
> to PayPal (they decided we were scammers and took our money) as well as
> around $US5k that vanished into the Brazilian banking system, which
> gives us $US45k for one conference.
>
> ***********************************************************************
> * THIS IS ONLY MY RECOLLECTION FROM A TWO-MINUTE SCAN OF EMAIL.       *
> * DO NOT TAKE IT AS GOSPEL, DO NOT RELY UPON IT AS ABSOLUTE TRUTH.    *
> *                                                                     *
> * SERIOUSLY.                                                          *
> ***********************************************************************
>
> If you feel this is unacceptable and are looking to assign blame, the
> mail archives back me up that the entire thing was entirely my idea, and
> every single costing and proposal came from myself.
>

I didn't mean to imply that, quite the opposite actually. I for one am
certainly grateful that X.Org funded my trip and lodging at XDS 2007.

Considering that:
- there is so much money in the bank (about 3 times what you need for
XDS 2007, *hint* *hint*),
- giving wide sponsorship makes these conferences better by gathering
more people
- the current economy does not help with funding conference trips
neither for the professional devs nor for the spare-time devs,
my opinion, and the point I was trying to make, is that we should have
more like that one...

Stephane