On 23 November 2014 at 11:25, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Having carefully read through some of the FDC rationales I thought they were appropriately strategic and made it pretty obvious exactly what those chapters that did not get what they were hoping for, need to change in order to bid more successfully.
I am not entirely sure about this. My concern is essentially that it is unclear to me how the FDC determines the extent of the cuts it makes and which item(s) of the budget get(s) cut by what amount of money. For instance, when to Committee suggests to reduce the allocation to WMDE by EUR 360,000 vis-à-vis what they requested (-30%), it is not clear to me how the Committee arrived at that amount of money.
There are plenty of possibilities, after all: It could be that they looked at individual items in the budget and found that the chapter overspends on these (in which case the Committee must have some idea of the amount of money they would find justifiable); it could be that the Committee members were generally angry about the alleged poor quality of the proposal and made an across-the-board cut; or it could be a combination of the two. But either way, while the FDC -- righly -- demands from chapters to present their budgets at a high level of detail (particularly if high sums are involved), the same, I would say, also applies to the FDC itself. An uninvolved third party should be able to see why you cut WMDE's budget by EUR 360,000 rather than by 150,000 or 550,000. I'm not seeing this. (Btw, I'm just using WMDE as an example because of the large amount of money involved; I think the issue I'm referring to applies to other proposals as well.)
Patrik