[foundation-board] OKF Long-term budget to 2013/14

[Jason Kitcat]

On 2 Jun 2011, at 21:39, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> On 1 June 2011 17:48, Becky Hogge <becky.hogge at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks so much for pulling this together. It looks great.
>> 
>> I see this budget forms part of the presentation we're giving to
>> Omidyar, so I want to make sure I'm fully briefed on it before the
>> meeting on 8th June. I have three specific questions.

Revised versions now available...

UK Pounds
https://spreadsheets1.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?authkey=CLOlrLQM&hl=en_GB&key=t2rQCMCP1Yc1ff4bgQrMokw&hl=en_GB&authkey=CLOlrLQM#gid=0

US Dollars (live conversion of one above)
https://spreadsheets0.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?authkey=CLHEtNAP&hl=en_GB&key=t5kgrLLQ9s7lmtiPlYEZkjQ&hl=en_GB&authkey=CLHEtNAP#gid=0

>> 1) Can you give me an account of the sorts of activity we plan on
>> engaging in to up our supporter income by the proportions indicated?
>> It looks ambitious to me (Board members will recall that I'm
>> particularly cynical about how easy it is to attract supporter income,
>> and I note that our income from this has actually decreased over the
>> last two years).
> 
> I think we want to organize (and allocate paid time to) a donation
> drive. At the moment we do absolutely zero to get community donations
> or the like and most of sites don't even have a donate button. I don't
> disagree that this is hard but I don't think those targets are
> impossible -- £10000 is a 100 people giving £100 a year ...
> 
>> 2) Can you give me an account of how we expect to attract the sorts of
>> grant monies indicated under "other project-related income - grants
>> etc)"
> 
> By going on doing what is happening at the moment: applying for
> grants, participating in FP7 bids etc. Also there is the Shuttleworth
> monies which cover 2010/2011 and parts of 2011/2012 (if Shuttleworth
> renew this will apply partially to 2012-2012)

There's quite a bit of money in the application pipeline with Shuttleworth, Knight, OSI and so on and we'd expect to continue those applications plus the many irons we have in EU funding fires.

>> 3) Can you give me your justification for why we are running a deficit
>> in 2011/2012.
> 
> There isn't a reason other than this would be where we did significant
> expansion (assuming Omidyar support). Given the nature of budget
> projects we could simply tweak the numbers to have a small surplus.

Also it's a way of reflecting spending lag. So we got significant CKAN income in 10/11 but didn't have enough coders online to spend it all. We're hiring more so will spend some of the 10/11 underspend in 11/12 hence the apparent overspend then.

>> None of these are criticisms - I simply want to know your thinking
>> behind these figures. And I'm well aware that these sorts of
>> projections are to some extent star-gazing exercises.
> 
> Quite (re stargazing!) :-)


To say the least!

All the best,
Jason
--
Jason Kitcat
Foundation Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation

+44 (0) 7956 886 508

http://www.okfn.org
http://twitter.com/jasonkitcat