Re: [Debconf-team] invitation letter (for universities and employers) Re: DebConf 9 - Main page

[Moray Allan <moray@sermisy.org>]

On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 09:49 +0100, Holger Levsen wrote:
> are there really supposed to be two letters for "visa support"?

In the past, the rough policy was:

- People who we knew, who requested it, and who provided us with the
information needed, got the 'sponsorship' letter.  This was mostly
useful for people from poor countries who we were providing food and
accommodation sponsorship to -- the letter was personalised to state
their full details and to say what we were providing.  For DebConf7,
we sent out physical copies of the letter wherever possible (i.e.
except where people applied very close to the conference, long after
our deadlines), as 'original' signed letters (not printouts/copies) 
were required by some visa officials.

- Anyone who wanted it (unless *obviously* just spamming lots of
conferences they'd never heard of) could get the invitation letter.
This could be useful for some visa/immigration purposes (especially
if you don't need or already have a visa, but just want something you
can show suspicious border officials), and in cases where we're not
providing accommodation/food sponsorship, there's probably no benefit
to the hassle of getting the person's full details for the first
letter (which frequently took multiple emails to the requestor).

Of course, the second letter may *also* be useful for non-visa purposes,
e.g. to show to an employer.  However, past experience shows that people
are typically slightly confused about what they want / about the 
distinction between the types of letter above, so it makes sense to have
one address dealing with both types of letter, and giving people advice
as needed.

> And second, which address should we use in the header of the letter, atm it 
> still has "debconf7 limited"..?

I raised this issue in the last couple of meetings.  It should probably
be the legal entity that the conference funds are going through, which
still isn't known for sure (that's why it's not updated yet).

I also sent Rene a copy of the letters a week ago as he offered to
translate them to Spanish, but I haven't heard back from him yet, maybe
someone else has time to do that quickly?  (But, to repeat myself,
please *don't* send the visa letter to the mailing list, each year we
already have Debian-unconnected people try to abuse our visa support.)

-- 
Moray