[IAEP] [SLOBS] Motions A & B for Tomorrow

[Dave Crossland]

On 2 June 2016 at 09:32, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:

> Specifically, I asked for evidence that there was a pressing need for
> unilateral approval of small expenditures and if so, why the existing
> scheme of pushing that responsibility to the teams as we currently do with
> the infrastructure team isn't a better strategy than putting that control
> in the hands of an individual.
>
> I did concede the point that having one person responsible for ensuing
> that financial transactions with the Conservancy are well form and complete
> would likely make life for the Conservancy better and thus have no
> objection to that aspect of the proposal.
>

It seems to me that the 2nd point answers the first; delegating small
spends to all teams means the likelihood the transactions are not well
formed for Conservancy increases.

I also am somewhat adverse to there being 'teams' at all at this point,
since the proactive community is so small. Why not just consider Sugar Labs
a single team? And thus have a single Finance Manager.

In 'organizational theory', Sugar has previously been somewhat a
'divisional organization' where there are separate groups that act more or
less independently. This is very common, and the history of DuPont
innovating this organizational form was for me very interesting;
https://stratechery.com/2013/why-microsofts-reorganization-is-a-bad-idea/
is a nice essay about all this from a few years ago when Ballmer was
crashing the company :)

"Consider General Electric, the classic example of a divisional company. It
has twenty-five different businesses, ranging from finance to jet turbines."


In a small organization without very different lines of business, this is
not the ideal organizational form, and I think Sugar Labs is better
organized as a 'functional organization' rather than divisional.
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