Florida Drupal Meetups - financial support

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ultimike's picture

Hey everybody,

Coming off yet another successful DrupalCamp Florida (thank you, volunteers!), a few of us were talking about how we can best reinvest some of the leftover funds we have from the camp back intp the community.

Perhaps the most important thing we can do is help grow and strengthen the Florida Drupal community.

With this in mind, we're happy to (re-)announce that if you are a Florida Drupal meetup organizer, you can request reimbursement for expenses to help grow and strengthen your local community.

We're willing to pay for things like:

  • Meetup.com memberships (the Tampa group just took advantage of this).
  • Occasional food (non-alcoholic) drinks for your meetup.
  • Reasonable travel expenses for bringing in Florida-based presenters (for example, if the Miami group wants to invite someone from Jacksonville to come speak at their meetup, I think we'd be fine reimbursing expenses for gas and food).
  • Other reasonable things that we haven't thought of yet, providing they help grow and strengthen the Florida community.

So, who is the "we" in all this? Who makes the decision on what will be reimbursed and what won't? Great question... Currently, I'm asking folks to email me to get reimbursed. If I feel it is an obvious "yes", then I just make it happen. If I'm not 100% sure, then I run it past Mike Herchel (the voice of reason) and Don Vandemark (the FLDC $$$ person). In the interest of keeping the process as simple as possible as well as open as possible, I'm inviting anyone to volunteer to be part of the decision making process. I envision a group of folks that I can email whenever we get a request for reimbursement. These folks would have a (time-boxed) opportunity to raise a red flag before the reimbursement is approved. My goal is to keep this as simple and open as possible.

Obviously, if you have an idea that you are curious if it will be reimbursed or not, you are more than welcome to contact me for "pre-approval".

Thoughts on any of this? Does anyone feel the proposed process could use some improvement?

thanks,
-mike

Comments

kclarkson's picture

We did a similar thing last year where we used the funds to host MiniCamp Atlanta in downtown and make it almost free. On top of that we decided to turn our sponsorship into a yearly sponsorship that covered all of our events.

I actually believe all Camps should be setup to make money in order to build a good reserve fund and then to fund activity through out the year within their community.

Kudos FLDC!!

Kaleem S. Clarkson
www.kaleemclarkson.com

drupal.org project?

ultimike's picture

Perhaps rather than doing the discussion/approvals via email, we can set up a Drupal.org project for the process. That way, anyone can chime in. I still would like to see it time-boxed - so folks have 24-48 hours to raise any objections otherwise the proposal is funded.

We can also use the homepage of the project to keep a public list of reimbursements.

-mike

Need to make sure we have a

Ky1eT's picture

Need to make sure we have a clear distinction of what is pre-approved and what is reimbursable without pre-approval. I'd hate to see someone raise a red flag for something that has already been paid for and in the reimburse process.

New project created

ultimike's picture

I've created a new project for this initiative: https://www.drupal.org/project/florida_ccg

-mike

Using funds for miscellaneous

davidhernandez's picture

Using funds for miscellaneous items throughout the year is always good. In NJ we use the money to buy food for every meetup, pay for meetup.com, occasional events, and seed money for next year's event. Always keep enough for a rainy day fund in case you have a particularly bad year where a big sponsor drops out or some emergency happens.

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