[Osmf-talk] Travel expenses for OSMF officials (to SOTM, mainly)
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Sat May 12 17:22:59 UTC 2012
Hi,
this year for the first time, SOTM will be held in a country (on a
continent even!) where every single board member will have to undertake
a long-distance flight to get there.
I guess that even minimal SOTM participation (flight & hotel) will cost
about £1000 per person; if all seven board members chose to attend, that
would be quite a lot of money for an organisation as small as ours.
I am in no way saying that board members should *not* be reimbursed,
after all it's the OSMF AGM and it would be quite a failure for an
organisation to have its own directors absent from a meeting for budget
reasons.
I am however interested in how OSMF deals with the issue (or, if no
decisions have been made yet, I recommend making them ASAP). The OSMF
wiki has a general page on expense claims
(http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances#OSMF_policy_on_expense_claims)
which basically says that "essential travel" can be reimbursed if "by
public transport" and "economy class", but that still leaves some
questios open:
* Who will be entitled to have their travel cost reimbursed? All board
members? Only selected board members? All board members plus selected
individuals from working groups?
* Is there a limit on the amount reimbursed? From where I live, there's
quite some difference in pricing (looking only at economy class, a
direct Lufthansa flight is €1200 return, while an Aeroflot flight via
Moscow is only €700 or so). Do we expect our board members to fly
Aeroflot if it's cheaper? Do we reimburse them for the "cheapest direct
flight"? What if they wait until the last minute and because of that pay
double? Same for the hotel - what amount of luxury do we pay for? A taxi
from Narita airport to Tokyo costs 120£ - is that within the budget or
do we expect our board members to take the train?
* What if people who are entitled for a reimbursement choose to prolong
their stay for holiday reasons, or bring a friend/spouse?
I am not asking these questions to cause trouble, but rather to avoid
trouble; I have worked in an organisation where questions of travel
expense reimbursement were quite often a source of friction and I think
it is good to have a few answers.
Of course nobody expects OSMF to have a 100-page travel expense
guidebook for the few occasions where people are actually reimbursed for
something. But in this case we're talking about a total amount that
might quite likely exceed 10% of total conference-related expenditure so
it's not peanuts.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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