EMWCon Bankroll Vote 2022

Date (UTC):	6 March 2022 16:00:00 - 6 March 2022 16:00:00

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A board vote was requested on whether MWStake should be the bankroll for EMWCon Spring 2022, the vote passed with the results as follows:

Board Member	Vote
Bernhard Krabina
Bryan Hilderbrand	Abstain*
Cindy Cicalese	Yay Y
Eric-Jan van Kakerken	Yay Y
Adam Shoreland	Yay Y
Lex Sulzer	Yay Y
Mark Hershberger	Yay Y
Markus Glaser	Yay Y

* Due to involvement, but Yay in principle

Text of request

Dear board members,

I'm requesting an emergency by-email vote on whether or not to #mwstake
should act as the bank this year for EMWCon.

Please reply to this email (feel free to CC cabal, as well, but it isn't
strictly necessary) with a "yay" or "nay" response.

We've discussed this at a few board meetings and came to a general
agreement to be the bank for this year's EMWCon (as I understood it) but
we didn't make an official vote and asked asked Bryan to provide some
more information.

Bryan has come through with that information and I'm conveying it below
so that we can vote on the issue.

Since we need to make a decision now--it is essentially 30 days before
the conference--we need to vote now.

Following is a lightly edited copy of Bryan's email about this:

MWStake bankrolling EMWCon lines up well with the goals of MWStake
and is probably something all/most of us think we should do eventually.

The real question may be, is this the year?  There is some risk in
attendance being the first in-person (really hybrid) event after 2 years of
virtual due to COVID.

Generally, the conferences should all be designed to come close to breaking
even with a slight bias towards being in the positives.  I believe all the
EMWCon conferences to date have done this with an average surplus of a few
hundred dollars.

Currently the MWStake bank account has $8,868.86 and the Google Sheet
for this year's finances (which is a bit rough at this time) shows a
cost (not including rooms which individuals will be paying for) of
$6,870 and a revenue of $8,250 with a positive revenue of $1,380.

If sponsors were removed it would be a positive revenue of $130.  The
current sponsors are a bit of a guess and will likely be higher, however
there are almost certainly some unaccounted for costs but the major ones
should be captured.  The expectation would be that MWStake would front
the expenses, then be reimbursed after the ticket revenue is collected
(usually a few weeks after the conference and usually through
Eventbrite).

The big risk in my opinion is cancellation, our contract for the
hotel/conference room/catering is the cancellations fees of:

   - $2,400 (20%) - 30 days in advance (which is basically now)
   - $6,000 (50%) - 7 through 30 days in advance
   - $8,400 (80%) - less than 7 days in advance

You'll note that the fee is higher than our costs because they include loss
of revenue due to room sales.  There is a force majeure clause so if we
pull the trigger, we should commit.

Thank you,

Mark