2024 Budget for AsyncAPI Initiative

[derberg]

Time for first-ever budget planning at AsyncAPI Initiative.

Below is the proposal of budget for 2024, that indicates planned credit income (basically sponsors) and planned debit (basically expenses).

EDIT: I updated info about bounty coordinator stipend from $500 to $400 after consulting with current coordinator

Some additional comments:

• 20% of total budget we secure as intact for next year
• Open Collective balance that you see there is from the last days of December 2023, so it is not polluted with donations that already are in place in January 2024
• Postman (Gold) and HiveMQ (Silver) are new sponsors that are in process to complete payment, so we can already take them into account for budget planning
• Any sponsors that will come later this year, the rule I will follow "not touch this money and leave for next year unless we do not have enough sponsors for the conference and need to sponsor some travels of community members"
• Community Manager - having a dedicated person hired brought great results and we should continue, and we should hire Thulie for another 12months
• Marketing - does not mean we need to hire someone full-time like in the case of Thulie. We can hire someone for a dedicated project, like for example I want someone to analyze how we use social media, what performs well, what strategy we should follow, what should we stop pushing. This can be a short project-contract. On the other hand, we can hire someone only for running social media. This is an open topic. What is the most important: we need a dedicated marketing budget and find some answers that nobody else can answer at the moment - last years it was on the community manager (me and then Thulie) but this is burning time of the community manager that has much more important topics to work on
• AsyncAPI Mentorship - the core of the proposal here is that we secure $16k for the program. Ace who runs the program will decide what to do and how to do it together with the community. I only secured enough money in case this year the plan is to pay mentors.
• AsyncAPI Conf on Tour - best case scenario is if it could finance itself with dedicated sponsors - this is the goal, but for now we need to secure a minimum amount for swags for the conference
• Other items I think do not require any special explanation, for example bounty was already approved before - I'm open for questions

This is a budget plan, and like any other plan can change in case of unforeseen situations like for example: one of sponsors that pays on monthly schedule suddenly stops doing it.

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Subject for @asyncapi/tsc_members voting:

• Please approve the planned budget
• Please approve the hire of @thulieblack for another 12months (starting from February 2024)

I will be attending community meeting next week talking about budget and answering any questions you prefer to ask on a meeting rather than in comments in discussion - up to you. Anyway, 7 day voting deadline will start counting next Wednesday after community meeting and we will have final answer on 31.01

[fmvilas]

Please approve the planned budget

The budget looks good to me 👍

Please approve the hire of @thulieblack for another 12months (starting from February 2024)

Hell yeah! @thulieblack at last one more year with us please 🙏 (in case you need it to be explicit, it's a "yes" 😄)

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I'd love to also highlight the fact that you're taking the time to do this exercise. Thanks for doing it, this is very much needed and we should keep improving on it. May I suggest that we review the budget plans every quarter? Up to you to decide.

[derberg]

Thanks!

Definitely will do Q-review. Until April many things can clear out, like shape of mentorship program for this year or how we wanna do the "Marketing" exercise. These things might affect budget

[Tenischev]

Question or rather "think out loud". If the current budget plan will stay and all points are done, then for the next year we will have only secured part of budget about 24k$ which is less than current sum ~48k$. So, probably, we will have smaller budget for the next year.
@derberg I'm interested in your point of view for this. I'm not eager to sit on mountain of gold, but I think it would be good to see your forecast or vision about real spending vs planned spending and which parts of the budget will be secured if for the next year we will have on 20% less budget

[derberg]

Very good question! Yes, planned reserve for 2025 is smaller than what we saved for 2024.

My main focus for 2024 is to bring as many more sponsors as possible this year. I'm already in discussion with few, pushing to get in touch with others. I also plan to attend in 2 weeks FOSDEM to learn about other ways of funding. Also before that, I will attend OSS workshop organised by European Commission - so basically grabbing more contacts.

I'm optimist that we will get more sponsors.

So such risky approach is based of source on some assumptions that we all together will have to verify after Q1

[Tenischev]

Thank you for the clarification!
Yes, for budget and @thulieblack work!

[derberg]

Thanks for a very good question as it means you took the time to read the proposal very carefully 🙏🏼

[derberg]

Hey folks, I do not see any more comments

Also as promised, yesterday I attended AsyncAPI Community meeting and explained budget there as well. Recording (12min) is here

@asyncapi/tsc_members please vote. I will wait until 31.01. I see there a lot of 🚀 but please remember 🚀 is not a vote, just a really nice endorsement. I want to enable https://github.com/cncf/gitvote for our organization so we can already dry-run emojis without yet enabling the bot.

So if you agree with the budget and Thulie hire put 👍🏼 on discussion or 👎🏼 if you disagree. Use 👀 if you hold yourself from voting on this one as neither decision is relevant for you

If you need some arguments for Thulie hire please look at 2 articles she works on and will be release this week:

• Annual Review: State of AsyncAPI Initiative 2023
• AsyncAPI Conference on Tour 2023 Report

[error9098x]

Hi, I am an active open source contributor, I am seeking mentorship and bug bounty opportunities to expand my skills and contributions. If there are budget considerations for mentorship, could someone guide me to relevant information or resources?

[smoya]

@derberg I added my 👍. Thanks for the thorough work you did here.
Even though I already added my 👍 , I do have a concern or maybe just curiosity about the Swag store costs. What is it that goes so high? Is there a really high cost regarding giving free stuff? What maintenance costs do we have? I would love to see a more detailed/fine-grained costs list on that side, just to understand if there is something else we could do to reduce that. Additionally TBH It is pure curiosity.

Thanks 🙏

[Barbanio]

@smoya, that's a great question. It would be great to try to lower the store's costs. You can see detailed information about the store's expenses in this document.

As you say, the costs are high. Maybe we could make it more affordable by keeping the store on our side. I don't know if it would be worth the commitment for the price we would save, but I think it could make sense in the long run.

[smoya]

Wow thanks for sharing the doc @Barbanio! I love the transparency 👏 👏
Yeah, definitely 5K/year for keeping the webpage (correct me if I'm wrong) seems like a lot, but of course I don't have all details about the requirements. I do guess we are in a Shopify right?

If you have more details, please share with me. This is not the place to discuss that for now so we could eventually move this discussion into a proper one in a separate community discussion if you are into as well 👍

[Barbanio]

Yes, sure, it makes sense. I moved this topic to a discussion. We can talk about the details there.

[subhamkumarr]

Will it participate in GSoD this year?

[derberg]

how is your question related to budget planning?

[subhamkumarr]

I am new. How can I get started for GSoD'24.

[derberg]

ok folks, budget approved 🚀

also @thulieblack already signed her contract for another year 🚀

now time to discuss how best to spend marketing budget 🚀