Hello,
unfortunately, dealing with issues from the past keeps this board very busy, so some items are later than everyone hoped for. For the next board call, which due to the public holiday takes place on Tuesday (!) next week, one of the main items to discuss finally is the budget.
General process
Recently, a proposal was made to hire developers in order to grow and share independent inhouse competence in various areas. There is no concrete plan so far, further details will be discussed in the call.
We will provide a spreadsheet with further budget details after the call, but in the meantime, I would like to give you an overview of the budgetting situation, based on the preliminary annual closing for 2024.
Ideally, we can come to an agreement how the budget will look like during next weekâs board call. Afterwards, I will share it with the accountant, so they can double check. Only then we will do the final approval for the official/formal budget, but I suggest we agree that we spent based a âfinal draftâ already next week.
The finalization of the formal document is a tedious task that involves a lot of A3 printouts, two screens, comparing every dot and comma, and it will cost me likely two days, plus translation on top, so thatâs nothing that can happen just en passant.
Numbers overview
As of January 1, we have 3.125.615,06 ⏠in the bank. Out of this 50.000,00 ⏠are the capital stock and CAN NOT be spent, and 1.244.814,12 ⏠are the free reserves which DO NOT HAVE TO be spent, but COULD BE spent.
However, given the current situation TDF is in, I suggest to not touch the free reserves for now. The previous board assumed half a million ⏠in emergency reserves already⌠Then, we have some additional income from this yearâs donations that we COULD spend, but it lowers our next yearâs budget.
I am sad we are hindered in planning some of these funds in because of the problematic situation. The irony is that some like to say TDF wants to sit on a pile of cash in the bank, which is utter nonsense, but the reality is that now we are forced to be conservativeâŚ
Factoring in some pending payments as of January 1, in total we MUST PLAN IN 1.752.018,24 ⏠to be spent for 2025.
Recurring costs
Recurring costs are structured like the past years:
- Accounting, payroll and auditor
- Legal advice
- Running cost & discretionary spending
- Trainings
- Infrastructure
- LibOCon & FOSDEM
- Community projects
- Marketing budget
Projects from the past
There is also a variety of projects from the past, for each of which TDF needs to decide whether to still pursue it and whether itâs still realistic in the near future. The projects are:
- MC request: Improvements on the Membership Committee tooling
- 2-4% budget to FLOSS software as devprojects or support
- MC request: TDF welcome kit for the members
- Update & translate LibreLogo manual, complete LibreLogo unit tests
- [MC] Carbon compensation
- 10% project budget for members
- Hardware for members
- BZ release funding
- [MC] Training on the reform of foundation law changes incl. BoD
- trademark filings
- Research and development of collaborative editing features based on open standards
- LibreTranslate Improvement of localizations and translations for worldwide involvement of volunteers
- In-person strategy workshop 2024-2026
- Legal consultations
- Outreachy
- Integrating Hetzner cloud to Jenkins
- Graphic design work for great visuals for website, socials, blog posts and marketing
- Bug Bounty Program
- Aptos font replacement
- LibreOffice SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) â CRA conformance
For some of them itâs unclear whether they would stay, for others itâs clear (e.g. the MC has a need for further work on their tooling), for others itâs unlikely (e.g. the strategy workshop is unlikely to happen in-person separately from LibOCon).
Iâve e-mailed board, membership committee and team to get feedback on the projects, so we can update the spreadsheet.
New projects
We also have a variety of proposals for new projects to be built for 2025 and beyond. Currently, the list reads:
- Extensions for local/remote access of Open Source LLMs/SLMs
- LATAM Conference
- JA community + LibreOffice Asia Conference
- Developer hirings
- TDF hosted open source LLM
- five tenders plus costs for external experts
- two legal items
- two HR items
- LibreOffice Roadshow
Some of the expenses could be merged into the marketing or community budget.
Based on my estimate which projects are likely to happen and which ones arenât, for entirely new projects, we would have 345.512,10 âŹ. However, this sum is just my estimate and has not been discussed - it heavily depends on feedback on the past projects, so take it with a grain of salt.
In any case, we should create new projects wisely, ideally with things doable or at least things that can be started this year. I suggest we only approve projects that have an owner (a person in charge of them), and a concrete budget.
I hope that provides an update on our budgetting situation, and that we can soon share more details and a close-to-final spreadsheet.
Florian