FUDCon Pune: Money Notes

No, this post isn't about FUDCon-branded currency, though we'd love to have those!

In addition to herding cats, I'm also keeping tabs on a spreadsheet that lists the various expenses we will incur and whether we're within our allotted budget.  The summary is that we're doing fine, and are nowhere near declaring bankruptcy (yet).

Right from the start of the FUDCon planning process, Rahul and I have been sitting together, thinking of all the expenses we'd have to incur and the income sources we have. The details were computed on that spreadsheet to begin with and a few highlights were put on the FUDCon wiki.  All this before we even submitted our bid.  We were given a budget of $15,000 from the Fedora Project, and before we submitted our bid, we would have to be sure we could pull the event off.

Now, of course, as the event is almost upon us, we have a much better idea on things and instead of the hand-waving, we have concrete numbers.

Foremost, the folks at the College of Engineering, Pune, the venue for the event, are graciously sponsoring the auditorium as well as classrooms for the talks. They are also sponsoring the Internet bandwidth and electricity.  This takes off a lot of monetary burden from the budget.

In addition to the $15,000 from the Fedora Project, groups within Red Hat Pune have given us an additional $8,000: $2000 from Red Hat GSS and $6000 by Red Hat Engineering (they initially gave us $3000, but later raised by another $3000).

According to current calculations, we're going to be spending $19,047 out of the $23,000 that we have.

The spreadsheet has all the details, of course, but a rough breakdown is:

Travel + Stay: $8918
Food: $1563
FUDPub: $3750
Swag, Banners, Posters: $4088
Infrastructure: $730

Those are the major categories. We're still unsure of the local travel costs (Mumbai - Pune - Mumbai and hotel - venue as well as venue - FUDPub venue), so I've used some rough figures, they should get confirmed by this weekend.

We decided to sponsor speakers and volunteers' lunch on each day, FUDPub (beer + food on Saturday) for speakers and volunteers, travel to/from COEP to FUDPub venue, and travel and stay (includes breakfast) for out-station speakers.

We have some money earmarked for infrastructure (wireless repeaters, access points, power plugs, power extension boards) that we think may be lacking at COEP.

The FUDPub budget got increased a bit recently as we had to hunt for a covered space to host it instead of in the open, as planned earlier. The rainy season may have passed, but the rains are continuing to pour in Pune. The last week has, in fact, recorded the highest rainfall for this season. Scouting for new venues has in fact been a positive thing: we now have a really great place to go to with great facilities (and food, and music, and of course, beer!). This also means we'll have to arrange for some local transportation for ferrying the people from COEP to the FUDPub venue and back, but we believe it all is going to be worth the extra effort and money.

Running this conference is proving to be a real joy ride. It's fun especially because of the tireless and fantastic volunteers. I'll post about all of them in a later note. I don't really want to distract them from their work into re-reading praises about them.