Following Proposal to change expenses policy: AI subscriptions I had another look at the expense policy.
I’m not proposing concrete texts yet, but I can do that later if/when we agree on the idea.
a. Approval/objection period
I think we should formalise a period to raise concerns or objections. It can be added to the ‘General principles’ section.
Since folks might not visit the forum frequently, I was thinking of a period of 30 days. However, that’s a bit long: for the AI expenses you’d only know very late and the expense policy for events currently mentions that events must be announced at least 2 weeks in advance.
Maybe we can set it to 14 days?
b. Eligible contributors
These two sections are a bit similar. I can understand we might want to be a bit more strict for recurring/personal expenses. At the same time, it’s probably clearer if we align/streamline/merge them.
c. Example clean-up
I think we’ll soon have enough actual past cases that give context. I’d suggest to remove it - ideas don’t really belong in such policy.
d. Naming, tagging & category of expense proposals
In conjunction with point a. I think we should clearly name and tag expense proposals, so people can follow them on the forum and set notifications accordingly.
- Naming & category: I believe we’ve been doing it already, but it might be good to ‘officially’ require proposals to start with ‘Expense proposal:’ and be placed under the ‘Project management’ category
- Tagging: I think we can use an
expense-proposaltag.
e. Developer tool subscriptions
The expenses policy doesn’t specify for how long a subscription can be covered and how often it must be re-requested. I reckon we want to keep some flexibility, but some guidance might not be a bad idea.
I think we can write that each request can cover a maximum of 6 months or the number of months the contributor has been ‘consistently active in the project’ since a previous request – whichever is smaller. I.e. if I’ve been actively contributing for 3 months (the current minimum), then I can ask for a subscription for the next three months. (Writing it like that, we may want to say ‘up to half of the active period’ - i.e. if three months active we can cover up to 1.5 month.)