Joel,
Money has this tricky property of being fungible, which is what allows governments, funding agencies, and even corporate finance people, to play such games. But on the other hand, what do you expect ISOC to do in a year when, for whatever reason, its general income is significantly down and designated donations for the IETF are significantly up? Given that we are entering a relationship of trust, I think there has to be flexbility to deal with unforeseeable circumstances such as those.
Brian
Joel M. Halpern wrote:
The concern (and I think it is minor but not insignificant) is not with incompatibility.
It is that as currently written, in the case of more IETF earmarked donation than expected, it is equally consistent with the text that either
1) ISOC maintains their level of general contribution to IETF activities
or
2) ISOC reduces their level of general contribution to IETF activities, because the money is coming from elsewhere.
We clearly want 1.
Governments lover to do 2. That is the game they play with "lottery money is only usable for schools" and similar nonsense.
Yours, Joel
At 10:25 AM 12/22/2004, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
Joel,
Joel M. Halpern wrote:
I think that there is a different side of this.
Suppose that a budget was worked out (as below), with a plan for a certain expected coverage from ISOC general funds, meeting fees, and directed donations.
Lets presume the budget includes the plan for building the reserves.
If meeting fees run high, presumably the IAOC and ISOC will negotiate about how much of that goes into extra IETF reserves, how much goes for previously unbudgeted but desired IETF activities, and how much goes to reduce ISOC general fund contribution.
What I wonder about is the case where earmarked donations run higher than budgeted. If ISOC is allowed to reduce its support from general funds for the IETF based on that increased earmarked donation, then it tends to undermine the value of the earmarked donation.
It seems to me that two conclusions follow from this:
1) The budget ought to be built around some assumption (based on experience) of earmarked donation.
2) But extra earmarked donation should go to either IETF reserves or other IETF specific activities that were not in the budget.
I'm not clear that anything in the -02 text with the minor proposed changes to get rid of "quarterly" is incompatible with this.
Brian
Yours, Joel At 08:51 AM 12/22/2004, Margaret Wasserman wrote:
Hi Bert,
At 11:13 PM +0100 12/21/04, Wijnen, Bert (Bert) wrote:
May be I need to explain my (personal) thinking.
This is good, because your personal thinking does not match my personal thinking and perhaps that is why we have been having trouble coming to wording that seems right to both of us.
In my view, just as an example, if we have this budget:
Revenues: expenses $5M - meeting fees $ 2M - earmarked donations: $ 2M - ISOC budget $ 1M
and at the end of the year it turnes out that we adhered to th $5M spending
and that the meeting fees and earmarked donations are say $ 5M, then I
would hope we can set aside $1 M for reserve funds for possible future
shortfalls and/or disasters.
I'd hope that ISOC would still be willing to allocate $ 1M for IETF
(at least untill we have our defined reserve fund established).
With the same budget numbers, I would, personally, think about it like this:
ISOC has agreed to cover a $5M budget. The IASA is only anticipating $2M in meeting revenue. This means that ISOC needs to raise funds (in one form or another) to cover $3M worth of expenses.
If meeting fees and/or designated donations do cover the full $5M, the budget is covered. If these revenue sources do not cover the full $5M, ISOC will need to cover the remaining expenses from non-IASA-specific funds.
I think that you are making a mistake when you consider the "earmarked donations" and the "ISOC budget" to be two separate revenue streams.
ISOC will have fund raising programs, and _all_ of the donations that ISOC collects from those programs are ISOC revenue. Some of that revenue may be earmarked to specific projects (IASA is only one of many projects that people may choose to fund) and/or collected via project-specific fund raising efforts, but all of this revenue and all related expenses are included in the ISOC budget.
I don't know whether or not IETF meeting fees will be included in the ISOC budget. That will depend on whether we view meeting fees and expenses as IASA budget items, or whether the meetings are run in such a way that only the surplus from the meetings shows up on the ISOC/IASA books.
In fact I would rather see a budget:
revenues: expenses - meeting fees $ 2M allocate to reserve fund $.5M - earmarked donations: $ 2M normal expenses $4.5M - ISOC budget $ 1M
And then if meeting fees turn out to generate an extra 1M without extra
cost, then put the extra 1M in the reserve fund so we get to our defined
"reserve" faster.
You still seem to be thinking that there is a goal to create a separate IASA reserve fund. I don't think that makes sense. The overall ISOC organization will be more flexible, and more resilient with a single, larger reserve that can cover the full operation (including IASA) than it will be if we hold separate "ISOC" and "IASA" reserves.
If the meeting fees and designated donations exceed the IASA budget on an ongoing basis, we will build-up some IASA-specific funds that could be used as a first line reserve, but I don't think that should be our goal, so I don't understand why we would want a budget that tried to achieve that.
Margaret
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