Fedora Regional Budgets in FY2014

The fiscal year of the Fedora Project and all our financial terms follow Red Hat which means that our fiscal year ended February 28th. Since then FAmSCo and regional treasurers have been working on making the final account for the just ended fiscal year. It mostly involved catching all late expenses from the last quarter. And the results?

EMEA – $21,940 spent out of $22,100 budget – I was actually surprised we ended up so close to the limit, spending everything we’ve been given and not overspending. I know managing budgets and expenses is difficult for employees of Red Hat, you can imagine how hard it is in a community of volunteers spread all over the continent.

LATAM – $12,436 spent out of $12,100 budget – LATAM overspent a bit, but it’s very much in the “OK” zone and I’m actually glad that they dealt very well with the new situation that planning and budgeting is now in their hands.

APAC – $9,591 spent out of $17,100 budget – unlike LATAM, APAC had problems to spend what they projected mainly due to the fact that many events they planned never happened. Definitely a lesson learned for the future.

NA – N/A – it’s the only region where we don’t have a clear picture how the money were spent because there was no community tracking of expenses. Many expenses there are paid directly by redhatters and are not reported reported back to the community immediately like in other regions.We hope to improve this.

And what are our budgets for this fiscal year? I think Ruth Suehle allocated the budget among regions quite fairly mainly based on what the regions fulfilled the plans in the last year:

NA – $43,850
EMEA – $32,000
APAC – $12,650
LATAM – $16,500

And if you wonder what’s being paid from these regional budgets it’s mainly swag (stickers, badges, case badges, mugs, hats, fliers), media, travel and lodging subsidies for Fedora contributors to represent Fedora at various events etc. Although it’s mostly handled by ambassadors it’s open to any Fedora contributors.