X.Org Treasurer’s Report FY2019

[Eric Anholt]

BEGINNING BALANCE (Jan 1, 2019)

   SPI Account                                                 $66297.99


Income

   GSOC                                                         $4200.00

   Sponsorship:General                                          $1312.91

   Sponsorship:XDC                                             $41385.00

   TOTAL INCOME:                                               $46897.91


Expenses

   Banking Fees                                                 $-389.44

   Cloud Hosting                                               $-2733.35

   EVOC                                                        $-2380.00

   Freedesktop.org Merger                                       $-541.01

   GSoC Travel Sponsorship                                      $-658.81

   Training                                                    $-1750.00

   XDC Travel Sponsorship                                      $-5238.61

   SPI 5% of Income                                            $-2346.01

   TOTAL EXPENSES:                                            $-16037.23


ENDING BALANCE (Jan 1, 2020)

   SPI Account                                                 $97158.67


== Treasurer’s Report for Fiscal Year 2019 ==



The bylaws[1] of the X.Org Foundation provide a duty of the Treasurer
to produce an annual financial report, approved by the Board, within
60 days of the end of the fiscal year.  The fiscal year is defined as
ending on the 31st day of December in each year.


X.Org is a member of Software in the Public Interest (SPI), which
handles most aspects of the Foundation's financial management.  After
a delay in providing treasurer reports, they posted last year's[2] on
March 26th, 2019.


== Financial Records ==



The X.Org Board maintains financial books using the Ledger-CLI
program, which is used for its own record keeping and to shadow SPI's
data[2].  The tabulated finances above are directly generated from
X.Org's Ledger, and thus is an accurate reflection of the state of our
own books.


This year, again, there has been significant delay in generation of
this report due to the mismatch between the information we get from
SPI and what we need to generate our report.  As an example, September
had an extra $4200 I couldn’t account for after going through all of
my records for treasurer activity (a significant amount, given all the
XDC activity that month).  Eventually I got some ledger output from
SPI showing that it was the payment for GSOC, so we could properly
account for it instead of thinking that maybe a sponsor had
double-paid (a possibility, given the trouble with XDC sponsor
payments this year).


== Funded Activities ==


The primary expenditure for the organization in 2019 was the X
Developers’ Conference held in Montreal.  We sponsored four developers
to travel to the conference, and one press reporter.


Since X.Org has adopted a code of conduct and formed a committee for
handling CoC violation reports, the board approved expenses for four
CoC committee and board members to attend a training on handling CoC
violations.


This year also included finishing payment for the second half of the
EVOC program mentioned in last year’s report (updating driconf).


== freedesktop.org merger==


The 2019 X.Org foundation elections opted to merge freedesktop.org
into the X.Org project, providing oversight (the board and CoC
committees) and funding management that it previously lacked.  They
had an outstanding balance at the time of the merger, recorded in this
report as a $541 expense.  However, one of my tasks in 2019 was trying
to sort out a previous verbal commitment by gitlab.com to sponsor
freedesktop.org for cloud hosting costs, which did not get resolved by
2019 but will appear in 2020 as a $9,000 donation, bringing the fd.o
merger back into the black.


== Cloud Hosting ==


The new expense that caught us by surprise this year was a bill for
cloud hosting in December.  We had received $30k in credits for Google
Cloud Platform usage from Google the previous year, which we had
expected to last more than a year.  However, projects grew rapidly in
their use of freedesktop.org services, primarily in CI (used by our
projects to ensure that the branches keep building and passing their
test suites).  2020 has seen significant efforts to curb our expenses
on this front, but it’s one of our challenges going forward.


== XDC Sponsorship ==


This year saw income from XDC sponsorship increase again, as we
increased the amounts for the Silver and Gold sponsorship levels.


The challenge with sponsorship this year has been getting the sponsors
to meet their commitments.  Two were still unpaid by the end of the FY
(so committed sponsorship for XDC 2019 was more than appears in this
report), and one is still unpaid as of this report.  After >150 emails
trying to get these resolved, your treasurer recommends that the board
remove listing of sponsorships not paid by the time of the event, to
avoid this pain in future years.


[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorgfoundation/bylaws/-/blob/ddc96eafd1ce8c5fbbbb587b8b76533263603aea/bylaws.pdf

[2] https://spi-inc.org/treasurer/reports/201912/