Am Donnerstag, den 24.03.2011, 17:59 +0800 schrieb Mathieu Bridon:
Disclaimer: I am not speaking for the French guys, since I'm not
with
them any more, having moved much further east.
On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 10:08 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 24.03.2011, 09:21 +0100 schrieb Joerg Simon:
> > and that we should decide together where to invest
> > money, i have to say that with the situation right now in EMEA the
> > shipping of centralized SWAG is no optimal. And therefore we encourage
> > the people to produce SWAG localy and get reimbursed or payed by PayPal
> > this is the working way right now.
>
> I feel the opposite is true: Swag should be centralized, because with
> the local approach causes more work and higher shipping costs.
>
> Imagine you are doing an event and need media, shirts, buttons and
> cheatcubes. You have to write mails to 4 different ambassadors.
> I then send media from Germany and you send shirts from Germany, too.
> Pierros sends buttons from Greece and Zoltan cheatcubes from Hungary - 4
> people have work and pay shipping.
Why would you ask Zoltan for a German event?
Because ATM he is the only person to have cheat cubes, even *German*
cheat cubes.
What Joerg is saying is
that you should produce cheatcubes for Germany instead.
Ok, lets look at the numbers from Gerold's quote:
* 1000 = 1265 EUR
* 5000 = 2025 EUR (405 EUR/1000, roughly 1/3 of the price for
1000)
* 10000 = 3000 EUR (300 EUR/1000, roughly 1/4 of the price for
1000)
So producing 1000 cubes in Hungary, Germany, wherever locally is a giant
waste of money.
With a centralized approach, you run the risk of receiving the swag
very
late, much later than if you produce them locally.
Why that? There are only two possible reasons:
1. Up to 400 EUR things can be approved by a single FAmSCo member
without public discussion, but for 400 EUR you can hardly
produce anything useful (see above)
2. Large amounts of money require a PO number instead of
reimbursement, but for larger sums you cannot pay in advance
anyway. The budget for media production was 5000 EUR. Do you
want to pay this and rely on reimbursement?
Why do you think we produce our swag in France? Because (for
example)
that's the only way we could have Fedora 13 media in time for our
release party.
Another example, you just received some Fedora 14 media, but Fedora 15
is about to be released. How is that useful?
Nobody said it was useful. It has to do with a whole lot of things that
went wrong:
* FAmSCo approved the money late: This can happen no matter how
much you request.
* It was forgotten: Can happen no matter how much you you request
and are better off it happens with a PO than with the money you
have already paid.
* PO procedure was complicated: This one has to do with money, but
you wont be able to produce media for < 400 EUR anyway, no
matter how many.
* We still had hope for the Multi-Desktop spin: Has nothing to do
with payment at all.
We have usually received our media within two weeks after GA. I
remember
the EMEA media for Fedora 13 were received almost a month after we had
started distributing ours.
Yes, because you (=the French ambassadors) are doing it on your own, you
don't care about approval from the board and because you happen to have
a NPO. Who would have paid if you didn't have the NPO? Are you willing
to pay and then wait for reimbursement?
And that was only the first central
recipient, who then had to ship them over EMEA, adding more delay before
people can have their swag.
This is not efficient.
Sure, doing everything locally costs a bit more money
Not only a little bit but significantly more, see above example. I can
give you the numbers for media production, the difference between a
small and a large batch is significant there, too.
(or not, one has
to consider the shipping costs that don't exist if you produce locally,
and the fact that it can be cheaper in some countries than others),
We are shipping to several key locations and from there the local
distribution is done. The local distribution has to be done anyway and
costs for the distributions to the anchor locations are around ~ 100 EUR
where Africa is about 55 EUR. We cannot change the Africa amount, this
leaves 45 EUR for distribution in Europe. This is nothing compared to
what we save with the bigger order.
but that is the only sane way to have swag to distribute in a
reasonable
delay (i.e as soon as possible after GA)
I distributed ~ 2500 media within a week. I don't think this is a
reasonable delay.
Regards,
Christoph