2016 budget proposals

Dear community,

the year 2015 is over, and we have achieved a lot of exciting things, 
thanks to your amazing work, dedication, passion and support - thank you 
so much for being part of our community and working with us on the joint 
goal of fostering LibreOffice!

In order to support the community even better, we would like to create a 
better budgetting process, have a concrete plan for 2016 already now, 
with a few "pools" or "buckets" defined, ideally:

1. community events (aimed at getting face-time for community contributors)
2. infrastructure (e.g. compute power/hardware/storage, cloud, VMs),
3. marketing (aimed at representing the project to the outside world)
4. other (anything that does not fit into the above)

The idea is to have a good plan for 2016 already now, while keeping the 
administrative overhead low, and have two authorizers (one of them being 
a board member or deputy, the other one from the wider community) 
responsible for each budget, which means getting receipts, approving and 
tracking expenses, and clarifying questions with Florian or Sophie.

To get a better understanding of your needs, we ask you to send us your 
budget requests within *three weeks* from this e-mail, i.e. by 
2016-03-02 to floeff@documentfoundation.org

While I monitor some of the lists, please always send your 
proposals/requests *directly* to me so they are not lost!

Please let us know your requests for funds *alongside* some items you 
envision to be paid from these funds. The items are not binding, the 
spending in the end is the responsibility of the authorizers, but some 
examples help the board in getting a better understanding of the funds 
required to best match your needs. If possible, please also mention the 
amount of travel costs associated. We'll factor in some margin, but 
concrete numbers and ideas are very much welcome to have a plan for 2016.

As a sample, a request could look like this:

##
We'd like to request a 2016 budget of
1000 € for community events
500 € for infrastructure
1500 € for marketing

Expenses we envision are
1. marketing: attendance at XYZ trade show to show LibreOffice to ABC 
user group (700 € booth costs, 300 € for collaterals and 500 € of 
travel, totalling to 1500 €),
2. community: a community weekend to discuss tasks and ideas (600 € 
hotel, 100 € for snacks and 300 € travel, totalling to 1000 €),
3. infrastructure: dedicated server to QA localized versions (500 €)
##

Alongside that, we will also provide some mechanism in Redmine for 
approvals and tracking of expenses, and will follow-up with details on 
this later on.

Thanks again for all your work, and looking forward to your proposals!

Florian