TL:DR There’s going to be a meet up of unconference people to discuss this topic.
Why?
For the last five years UKGovCamp has run a bank account for two purposes:
- Taking in sponsorship and covering costs for the annual event
- Holding sponsorship above and beyond the costs to offer grants to other events in keeping with the aims and values of the UKGovCamp community
Right now, the account has a single signatory (Steph Gray) and slightly awkward banking administration which makes it hard to transparently account for how the money is handled. We’ve not encountered any issues so far, but in the spirit of Govcamping, we’d like to be more transparent and involve more people.
We think it makes sense to:
- Move the account and existing funds (nearly £20k, chiefly from UKGovcamp and OpenDataCamp sponsorship) to a more flexible and convenient bank, and add more signatories to the account
- Use this opportunity to put some better governance in place for how the money is administered
- Consider how we can open up the banking facility and support to encourage more events to draw on the grant funding and overcome barriers to taking sponsorship
We would like to talk to anyone in the wider public sector unconference community who is interested in this topic, to get your views and make some decisions to take effect from February 2018.
We’ll arrange a meeting in Westminster on Friday 19th January at 4pm – anyone interested should contact Vanessa Williams (sponsors@ukgovcamp.com) and you’ll be added to the invite.
If you can’t make the meeting but have views on how we manage Govcamp Grant funding and banking, please email Vanessa or leave a comment below