Reps/SOPs/Budget/Special Cases

Warning: With effect from 1st September 2023, the Mozilla Reps program was closed and activities ended.

Special Cases

There are instances when a Rep is the owner of an event/initiative that is co-conceived with Mozilla staff and has already been approved for sponsorship by Mozilla staff. This means that the staff member has approval from their team to fund this event. Special events do not use the Reps budget and therefore can be approved by a staff member without the council's approval.

Examples include:

• FOSDEM
• Large scale inter-community meetups

For more information on how to proceed for Staff members please check this

Budget Request

Your budget needs to be requested AND approved at least 2 months prior to the event. If it is not, there is a high chance it will be rejected.

These slides provide a more detailed explanation of the Standard and the Special budget request.

Pre-Approval

These events DO NOT require Council budget approval but Council should be able to provide feedback on the budget.

However, these events do require the approval of staff members. The approval chain is:

• One person on the team that is funding the event
• One Reps staff member (currently Ruben)

The goal is not to try and deny budget, but to do a sanity check that the budget has been optimized before the event organization kicks off in earnest.

Whiteboard

For these special cases, although budget is already approved, the Rep owning the event STILL NEEDS TO FILE A BUDGET REQUEST BUG (ie. creating an event page, identifying metrics of success, getting feedback from their mentor and from the council, reporting after the event).

The only difference is that the Reps needs to clearly indicate that their event/initiative has already been approved for budget. Moreover, the Reps needs to copy a Mozilla paid staff member on the bug and this staff member MUST CONFIRM IN A COMMENT THAT THIS EVENT IS SPONSORED AND BUDGET REQUEST IS PAID FOR BY HIS/HER TEAM. Once verified by a council member, the council member must set the flag to "+".

To indicate that their event/initiative has already been approved for budget, the Rep needs to update the whiteboard accordingly:

   Bug Status : ASSIGNED
   Bug Whiteboard : [special]

Council Voting

The Council still needs to vote in the voting pad to express support or reservations about the event/initiative. Although not mandatory, it is highly recommended that special case still get majority approval from Council. If the majority vote is negative, this indicates that the Council does not approve of this event and the Rep is strongly encouraged to work with Mozilla paid-staff to address the concerns raised. That said, the Council CANNOT block budget approval for special cases.

Payment

Please note that the staff member approving the budget is responsible for making sure that the funds are properly transferred to the Rep. For assistance, you can reach out to Kiki (kelimutu [at] mozilla [dot] com)

Requesting reimbursement after the event
The Rep can request for a reimbursement until 90 days after the event. After that the request will be rejected.

Benefits of getting Council approval

Filing a budget request bug even if the Rep-owned event/initiative is already approved for funding still has the benefit of ensuring that the Rep documents the event through ReMo channels, that the Rep gets constructive feedback from the Council on his event/campaign (particularly with regards to success metrics), and that we stay transparent in terms of what we spend. Essentially, the only difference is that for these types of budget requests, Council does NOT need to approve them as they are already approved.