Planning Fedora's budget

By Jonathan Corbet
April 27, 2016

Even the most open organizations tend to close their doors when the time comes to plan budgets and decide where money is to be spent. The Fedora project is trying to do things a little differently — more openly — this year with its budgeting process. While no decisions have been made, the discussion shows the priorities that the project is trying to juggle and the tradeoffs that must be made.

The Fedora project's funding comes from Red Hat, of course, but its disposition is managed by the (still Red-Hat-dominated) community. This budget does not include the developers funded by Red Hat; that is handled within the company and is not subject to the community's oversight. As a result, this budget is not really there to fund the development of Fedora itself; instead, it essentially funds the community's outreach efforts.

The scenario sheet posted by Remy DeCausemaker shows that this budget has been stable at $195,000 since the 2014 fiscal year, and will remain at that level for the 2017 fiscal year (which actually began in March). This budget has to be divided between a few different programs:

In-person gatherings, dominated by the annual Flock event, which is set for a fixed cost of $75,000. A total of $25-30,000 will also go into two FUDCon events, one in Latin America and one in the Asia-Pacific region.
Fedora Activity Days (or "FADs") — a FAD being a sort of hackfest focused on a specific topic. Planned FADs will be focused on documentation, design, and the cloud, with others possibly happening as well.
"Diversity and Inclusion," which, in practice, means support for Outreachy interns.
Fedora Ambassadors projects in various regions of the world. This money seems to mostly go toward funding volunteers to attend various events and fly the Fedora flag; it tends to be parceled out in fairly small amounts. See the proposed budgets for the Latin American or Europe, Middle-East, and Africa regions for examples.

The discussion, as seen in the mailing list and in the April 18 advisory council meeting, was focused on how to divide up the relatively small portion of the budget left over once the major events have been funded. In practice, that meant deciding whether to fund the FADs at the full level (set to $30,000 in this scenario, enough for six events) or half that, and how many Outreachy interns to fund (the range being from zero to two). Whatever money is left over after those decisions are made will then go to the ambassadors for the four regions; splitting it between the regions will be the topic of another discussion.

The process is thus, like many budgeting exercises, dominated by decisions about the relatively small piece of the budget that is not already set in stone. The council can make a statement about where its priorities are, but the amount of money involved is not enough to make a significant difference to the project one way or another. So it is unsurprising, perhaps, that there have been calls to push Red Hat for a raise, especially when one considers that the budget has been flat for years and Red Hat continues to announce good financial results.

Fedora leader Matthew Miller responded that the project is looking for ways to get a higher level of funding, but that will take some work. Fedora's user base is growing, but that is not enough:

The numbers show that it is working: we _are_ growing. This is excellent — but, we can't simply tell Red Hat "Look, we're growing, so give us more money." The response to that is "What are you doing with the money we've been giving you?" — and, frankly, other than saying "Well, we hope that the positive numbers we're seeing are linked to whatever we spent it on", we don't currently have a good answer to that.

So, this is absolutely not the old budget process. This will allow us to _really_ answer that question — and not just for Red Hat, but for ourselves, because as we look together at these hard decisions on where to spend and where to scrimp, we need to ask ourselves the exact same thing. For every dollar, does this advance us towards our mission over other possibilities?

It makes sense that the money spent on promoting Fedora should somehow be justified. The discussion so far, though, has not focused much on which expenditures are actually effective — at least, that has not been seen in the public discussion. Various members of the council have expressed their preferences, most of which lean toward less "central" spending and more money for the ambassadors, but they have not said why they believe that mix will do a better job of promoting Fedora.

Such questions are never easy to answer, of course; organizations around the planet agonize over the best ways to spend their limited discretionary funds. Usually this process happens away from curious eyes, a setting that, perhaps, makes the process a bit less stressful. The Fedora project is making an attempt to be a bit more open; it will be interesting to see if doing so changes the decisions that are made — or, at least, leads to a better understanding of how the project's scarce resources would be best spent.