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Re: [Debconf-discuss] [Debconf-team] Travel sponsorship BoF: minutes



On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 12:45:37PM +0200, Holger Levsen wrote:
> (I totally agree this is about finding new ways / solutions...)

> On Sonntag, 22. August 2010, Wookey wrote:
> > I'm not sure exactly how this info will/should affect the process. I
> > guess the main thing is that people should at least know they will get
> > the money 3 months in advance. If it's only 2 months then expect the
> > costs to almost double.

> the problem is, or rather was in previous years, that we never knew 3 months 
> in advance, how much money we would have. This year, IIRC, we didnt know 
> whether we had enough money to run the conference until two weeks in advance 
> or such.

> We always knew that buying tickets in advance is cheaper and would have liked 
> to give money to sponsored people ASAP, but basically always this simply 
> wasnt possible. 

> So IMO the (first) problem is how to get 50k (to use a random number) 3-4 
> month in advance. 

> Maybe the solution for this is to deal with two different budgets, one for 
> running the conf and one for sponsorship. This would complicate aquiering 
> sponsors ("does your company want to sponsor the conf or developers 
> traveling") but it would ease spending the money on sponsorship: once we have 
> the sponsorship money allocated, we could spend it, whether the conference 
> budget has the funds or not.

> (I dont think the solution is to have two different budgets.)

One thing that I haven't seen much broad recognition of in discussions
around travel sponsorship is that, if we agree that spending money on
last-minute tickets is not an efficient use of the sponsorship money, *maybe
we should just not do that*.  Hold the money for the next conference,
instead of spending it in suboptimal ways!  If that means fewer people are
sponsored in the short term because the money wasn't available in time for
them to commit to reasonably-priced plane tickets, that's a regrettable
outcome for those individuals who are unable to attend /this/ year,
particularly as their plans may not align with DebConf again in the next
year or two; but being able to hold this money in reserve so that it's
available early for the *next* conference would give us the slack needed to
make better use of sponsoring resources over the long term.

This doesn't require anything so elaborate as "two different budgets", but
it does require some discipline to not look at the leftover money from the
travel sponsorship allocation and try to claim it for other things - and
also to not short-change travel sponsorship in the budget for the next year
merely because "money is left".  (In fact, this is something I think DebConf
has failed at in the past.  When I was involved in travel sponsorship a few
years ago, there was a year when there was enough money to sponsor everyone
who had applied for it that the team believed it was appropriate to sponsor,
with money left over.  Instead of saving the money for the next conference,
the remainder was spent in much lower-priority areas.)

There's a lot of work to be done to flesh out such a plan, obviously.  If
there's support for this in principle, I would be willing to put some effort
in to help turn this into something viable.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org

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