[Debconf-team] Re: DebConf "Legal" BoF continued - lets get it to a Delegation
* Anthony Towns (aj@azure.humbug.org.au) [060610 08:31]:
> On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 09:31:46PM +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> > So, I propose to delegate [...]
> > as the DebConf organizers[1], responsible to organize the yearly
> > Conference. The DPL grants the DebConf Organizers the right to use money
> > From every legal organization that works for/with Debian, such as SPI in
> > America or ffis ev in Germany, to name only two examples, without further
> > interaction of the DPL or anyone else, if that money was marked as being
> > for the Conference.
>
> For the Mexico conference, aiui, $29k or so was needed in advance
> of sponsorship arriving; which wasn't money marked as being for the
> conference.
Yes, we got that money extended in order to be able to make the
downpayment to the hotel. We had a lot of expected incoming money
into SPI´s account but it was not yet there. We had ~13kUS in
money from earlier debconfs in the SPI account at that point in
time.
> Personally, I've got a few concerns about how the conference is organised,
> which I'd like to list privately for your consideration:
I would appreciate if you specified "concerns" more closely. to
me it has a negative ring.
> 1) travel sponsorship seems very obscure; I think that results in
> a few people getting worried about it just being the organisers'
> friends getting sponsorship, rather than it being anything
> sensible. I was pretty surprised to find out Branden apparently
> didn't get travel sponsorship to .mx. Having a rule that
> sponsorship amounts get published somewhere, and all sponsored
> people are expected to do either a proper talk, or a lightning talk
> on what the work they've been doing might be a worthwhile idea.
Yes, i recall Ted raising that concern. who else said
something like we would sponsor just our friends? I know you wont
give out any names now, but like this is FUD to me. Of course
appearence is important if we want to look good, but i was more
interested in results then apprearence.
Branden did not get any money because he specified that he could
do with anything between 0 and 500USD. The goal is usually to not
pay people who can actually afford the trip on their own. Other
known debian people who decided to not require any sponsorship
were e.g. liw or bubulle. I asked even you (after you were
elected DPL) if you actually NEEDED the full amount specified.
Travel sponsorship has a devided purpose:
1) support people who would not be able to come otherwise, to
enable them to participate.
2) be a way for debian to say "thank you" to peopel who
accomplished outstanding things in the past for debian.
(To judge those two points we involed a lot of people, since it
is not very meaningfull to devide between DDs, NM or other
helpfull people.)We had several IRC sessions to debate and vote
on all the people who had requested sponsorship. Those were
usually not open since i know that some people are not very
compfortable about requesting sponsorship and we did not want
discussions like "why did he get money and i did not? i could
have asked for more if i had known! ...". We have plans to
improve this part of the sponsorship process in order to be able
to ask even more people to help in the decision process where
they are knowledgeable and know people.) I an not at all sure
that making it transparent for everybody makes it more just or
fair of helps the people we try to help. If people envy others
or suspect they are sponsored more then they themselfs i think
that is their personal problem and will only get worse with
transparence.
> 2) food and accommodation sponsorship seem overboard -- it's a good
> thing to make it possible for people not to have to have to worry
> about cost of living, but it's silly to subsidise people who can
> afford their own dinners anyway; having food sponsorship available
> on request, and letting people who don't need the subsidy just
> go to local restaurants or buy tickets for the sponsored venue
> seems much more sensible
This is a point that we can fine-tune. we are considering to
introduce a "corporate pricing model" that bdale and keithp
suggested. that way we can ask companies (who just dont care) to
pay ~800US for participation, for example.
That said, the free food and accommodation are means to make it
an inspiring and special event for people. It would be
interesting to find out how effective that is to achive this
goal.
> 3) the distance between the hacklab and the lecture rooms we've had
> the past couple of years has been really bad to the point where it's
> discouraged people from going to talks
can you be more specific at which location it was very bad, very
good or just great?
Others raised this point too, and i disagree. but since we try to
be "customer oriented" (please supply a better word if there is
one) we try to give people what they want and not argue with them
what they like and what is good for them and will try harder to
find places that have all the locations closer together.
> 4) it's not entirely clear what the point of the conference is, there
> are more than a few possibilities:
>
> -- educate people with talks; in which case we should be
> aiming to get good talks and tutorials, and lots of people
> there to watch them
>
> -- provide an opportunity for DDs to get together and hack on stuff;
> in which case we should be making sure we've got good connectivity
> and resources, and minimise distractions and lost time
>
> -- give people a chance to meet face to face, socialise,
> reduce aggression and brainstorm new ideas; in which case
> we want to make sure people can go to dinner or clubs and go off
> in smaller groups
>
> -- provide an excuse to have some fun rather than just hack and flame
> each other
>
> -- prove Debian is just as cool as Ubuntu because we can
> have expensive conferences too
>
> My impression is we do a little bit of all of these, but get them
> confused so that none of them are really achieved as well as they
> could be -- so we invite DDs around to hack, but then distract
> them by making them prepare a paper and a talk; or we host it in
> a nice location with lots of fun stuff to do, then tell them that
> debconf is really about work not about fun.
>
> I don't want to say any of the above is a bad idea; but it might
> be worth keeping in mind what goal you're trying to meet by flying
> people in, or organising the talk slots, or whatever.
The point of the conference is to inspire people about debian. it
is geared towards motivating them for an other year to work on
debian and to set them on fire for our cause. All the points you
name above (differently worded) and the food and travel
speonsorship, too, help in our oppinion to reach that goal. if
you know more and perhaps even more effective means to reach that
goal we are *very* interested in hearing about it. This is also
true the other way around: if one of these points hinders or
hampers inspiration we want to know about it and get rid of it.
A fairly constant number of people seem to come for talks. we
have hardly ever seen more then 60-70% of the attendees attend
one single talk. But those who attend talks find them important
and good. The talks are selected to be a balanced mixture of
educational, revolutional/new things, self-reflecting (aka about
debian and how it works) and political. The goal of this is again
to inspire people about debian. They should be thrilled about
the breadth and width of it, and if they enjoy so, learn new
details about things they know. (This is btw my main issue with
Manoj's "vote on everything!" since I dont expect a result that
would be more inspiring then what we have now.)
Hacking,socializing, brainstorming, having fun and enjoying
oneself are prefered to some degree by other people. And
finally it _is_ very important to feel that the thing i spend so
much time on is cool and we definetly try to get that
idea across. (not specifically cooler then just ubuntu, but
cooler then everything else.)
> 5) There doesn't seem to be a lot of feedback from the participants and
> speakers to the next year's organisers; which is especially a problem
> if the lead organisers stay the same each year.
that is not really true. we listen to people and improve
the conference successivly. we started to have evaluation
questionairs since debconf3 in oslo and i have been pushing
people to integrate them into the conference management system
and webinterface. I also asked for help from people who are good
at questionairs and statistics to produce more meaningfull and
relevant questions and evaluations. Unfortunatly both lack of
motivation and time of those people in key positions made the
questionairs close to invisable and at debconf6 even
non-existing. this is very unfortunate, but after what troubles
we had at the last conference i consider the lack of questionairs
a small price to pay in comparison. It is part of our wishlist
for the conference management system for next year, though.
I understand you are statistically inclined. do you have
experience with questionairs and are you willing to help us?
> I'm also not sure why debconf remains free for all comers;
we dont try to encourage everyone and her dog to come. we say
that it is a technical conference and we do discourage people who
dont seem to have the proper background from attending. we do
check weather or not people who request sponsorship, visas or
other things and try to find out if they have anything to do with
debian and what they contributed. we even ask people who might
know better then we and ask about the involvement of the
respective person.
> that makes
> it expensive to have lots of people come (as we don't get additional
> income, and get additional expenses in the form of food and lodging as
> well as venue size), which limits us to a purely developer conference,
> and also means people who could easily afford a registration fee even if it
> were optional, aren't presented with that opportunity to support debconf.
>
> The GUADEC fee structure is worth looking at:
>
> * Students & hobbyists: 30 euro
> * Professionals (see below): 150 euro
> * Staff & volunteers: free
> * Speakers: free
> * Press: free
>
> * Starting on May 1st these fees increase 15%
> * Starting on June 1st these fees increase 30%
>
> * GNOME Foundation members registering as students/hobbyists
> get a 100% discount: free registration.
> * GNOME Foundation members registering as professionals get a 50%
> discount: 75.
> * Advisory board companies get 5 free registrations and pay 100
> for each extra participant they bring.
> * Community partners bringing 5 people or more get 1 free
> registration and pay 20 for each extra participant they bring
> in a single group reservation.
>
> -- http://guadec.org/GUADEC2006/registration/fees
>
> For comparsion linux.conf.au has three registration levels -- student,
> hobbiest and professional, at levels of $100, $250, $600 (all AUD)
> respectively. After a few years of running a successful conference,
> that attracts 500 or so people to listen to Linux development talks,
> we have about twice as many professionals as hobbiests, and twice as
> many hobbiests as students; in spite of the professional level not being
> a lot more than a way to show your support for linux.conf.au and Linux
> in general. It makes the budget much easier to manage, and dramatically
> reduces our reliance on sponsors.
yes, that would be a totally differnet conference and i think
also a pretty differnet set of attendees. Here i am interested in
whom we would loose and who would come, additionally.
> Basically, I have a few concerns related to how debconf money is being
> handled; and at this point, I'm reluctant to delegate authority to obtain
> funds from supporting organisations like SPI. That there doesn't seem
> to be a clear idea exactly who should be delegates also bothers me a bit.
I *think* this paragraph was just the summary of the many
paragraphs above. is that true?
Regarding the delegates: I want people with good leadership,
legal and social skills. Both gunnar and fabian fit that bill. I
would like to be delegated, too. (c:
> Andreas, since you seem to be the nominated lead, feel free to forward
> this mail to -team or otherwise if you think that would be helpful;
> or otherwise feel free to deal with these issues as you think is best.
done
> (I'm not sure why Marga at least wasn't on the Cc list; if someone who
> follows the debconf internals closer than I do thinks there are others
> this needs to be forwarded to, please do so)
yes, i suppose that was an oversight. i think ganneff just looked
at the video of the bof and send the mail to everyone who was
there.
> > [3] There was the suggestion to always CC such mails to
> > leader@debian.org, and no answer within 2 days means implicit OK. To
> > make it legally more OK, as for example in Germany usually only the
> > "board of directors" of a association is allowed to use the
> > money.
>
> In this case, the relevant board of directors would be ffis' or SPI's, who
> would still be in the loop anyway afaics. So I don't think that is a problem.
The fact that you put so much time and efford into this mail
shows me more clearly then the choice of words ("Issues",
"concerns"...) that you want to help (but then that could be my
non-native-speakerness). That intention is very much
appreciated. Thanks.
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