Re: When will the List of applicants whose Bursary request have been accepted will be Announced
<snipped>
Warning - would be a bit long.
Dear Manas,
There is nothing to be sorry about as Tiago shared. It is a recurring
issue as Tiago pointed out. Also sorry, if my reply came out rude,
that was not my intention if it came out that way.
It's just the number of applications versus number of people who can
go through them.
>From what little I was able to glimpse/figure out the applicant/busary
team is probably in the range of 50:1 or more which is quite a bit.
This is on the basis of couple of years estimate of applications and
rough number of people who may have gone through the application.
The only outlier I know might be Germany where 550 people were given
bursaries. I honestly would like to know how many applications were
there and how many people were scrutinizing the applications and how
much time it took to complete the process. That probably would have
been a nightmarish job.
While I suspect that the people who go through bursary applications
may be using some of the techniques used by an Embassy official to
figure out whether s(he) should give you/me a visa , still it would
be quite a bit of work. Unfortunately, the embassy people have much
more resources and many ways to get info. about you then the bursary
team. And even then you have to wonder why it takes the visa people
one month or more to give you a visa or deny (especially when you are
paying for it and they are paid quite a bit more than the average
person in most establishments.)
Add to that the bursary team may ask for clarifications just to make
sure that anybody who by mistake didn't complete a form or didn't
answer a question/query is asked to make sure that deserving
applications are given enough of a chance.
'
The only way for bursaries to complete on time in all fairness is if
they close about 4 months before the conference or alternately have
double or triple the number of people who are able to evaluate bursary
requests so attendees have the possibility of getting cheap tickets,
get the visa and do whatever formalities needed to be completed.
AFAIK, to avoid conflicts of interest situation, if you/I have a
bursary request then we cannot evaluate other's requests and that is
correct so it often comes down to the pool of people who have the
energy, capacity and willingness to shift through lot of content
without much obvious to be seen and appreciated over the years. This
would be only those people who either -
a. are part of the local team.
b. have no interest to be part of a Debconf for that specific year and
have the time, patience and eyes for doing the job.
Also having a series of happy coincidences such as getting sponsors in
a month or so and they paying well in time would free up time for
other activities, the same could be shared for the other number of
things which need to happen before bursaries come in the picture :)
I am going to share something which somebody shared in some other
context but is probably apt in these conditions -
. For you it might be '1' thing that should be done, from the other,
you might be the '40'th or even 100th on the list. This we experience
everyday in any activity and more so in India where we services are
not commensurate to number of people living.
I haven't tried to dig how the bursaries team operates but would guess
it would take them in the range of a month, month and a half or a bit
more to get through the whole process if not more.
And as shared , people who are bursaries may have other
responsibilities other than just looking at bursary applications .
Some of them might be part of the local team so they may also other
responsibilities in organizing Debconf apart from their day job,
family life and life in general.
As a former bursary team Tiago might be able to share some stats. or
experiences he might want to share. I would like to document the role
of Bursaries team in more detail in
https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf/DebConf probably as another page
altogether . I have seen scattered info. about the bursaries team but
not much in concrete terms of stats. and content which can be shared
across the community.
I do understand the need to have bursary team members to have privacy
but having the process documented might make it easier for others to
understand what (if anything) can be made better.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
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