Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf 9 - Main page
Quoting Kapil Hari Paranjape (kapil@imsc.res.in):
> 3. I will need to obtain a visa for this travel. Is there a formal
> letter that is issued by the organisers that will assist my visa
> application?
I don't have answers to KHP's questions (actually, I should say that I
don't feel that I have the authority to answer them) but I take this
opportunity to insist on the need of having a schedule that's as early
as possible if we want to have the opportunity of having more than
zero contributors from South Asia (India and neighbour countries) as we
had at last Debconfs.
All these countries' citizens need a visa to travel to Europe. For
most of us who already had to get a visa from their own places, this
is definitely *not* the same game. To get a picture of how this can
be, ask people who already had to apply for a visa to India (and had
to do it themselves)...you'll probably get a picture of 10% of the
hassle it can be for citizens of India in their country.
They need to go to an embassy or consulate of a EU country to get it
and there are few of them in India (for instance, while many of our
regular contributors from India live around Bangalore, I think they
need to go to Mumbai or even New Dehli to get such services). In order
to get a visa, they need to go there *twice* and I'm fairly sure they
need to do it "physically".
The travel costs are of course incredibly high and, in short, I can
easily suspect that none of our potential contributors can afford this
on their own (this is of course the case for most *other*
contributors) and because this is highly related to visa issues, that
brings more need to have things decided in advance. And probably very
few of them can have their company/institute fund their participation.
I would "personnally" (I should more say "with my i18n hat") really
want to have more attendees from "outside our usual places" (namely
Europe, Northern America, Latin America and Australia/NZ) but it seems
that this requires having some specific treatment, particularly on
sponsoring, travel support and visa issues. That may sound slightly
like treating people differently but late sponsoring answers have the
same result, more or less.
I think that, having developed a knowledge network over years because
of the i18n work I'm nagging the entire Debian crowd with, I can
offer some help in working on this along with the sponsoring team. So
please take this as a formal offer to help in these matters, including
working with the sponsoring team on this.
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