At our local team meeting on Feb. 14th[0], we discussed different teams, and various folks volunteered to work on various teams. One of those teams was the bursary team, a team who was tasked with working on sponsorship decisions. Based on the notes, the people who volunteered to work on this team were: myself, Clint, Kris. On March 18th[1], Michael Schultheiss sent an email to debian-devel-announce and debconf-announce announcing that we are going to open up the sponsorship selection process, and soliciting help for people to work on sponsorship decisions. Several people responded and were added to the Debconf10 Teams page under the Travel Sponsorship sub-team of the larger Sponsorship Team[2]. The reason to send out this request for help was because it was decided to do so at the Global Team meeting on March 17th[3]. From a process perspective, this is very confusing. The local team bursary people were not part of this discussion or decision. The announcement was sent from someone who was not part of the bursary local team; additionally, the announcement managed to not be sent to either the local team or the people who had volunteered to work on this. Finally, none of the local team people who had volunteered to do bursary work were included on the resulting Teams page. I think that it makes a lot of sense that Michael Schultheiss is part of this team, even though he was not present at the local team meeting to raise his hand to say he wanted to be part of the team that is working on this. I also think that it makes sense that the people who volunteered to do this work are part of this team. I certainly do not fault him or the others for this, in fact I think that opening this decision up is the right thing to do and I appreciate Michael's work towards this! However, its confusing because the role of the global team vs. that of the local team is perceived differently by different people. At our first local team meeting, we explicitly discussed our decision making process, and came to an agreement of how that would work for individual teams on a broad scale. One of those pieces was that each team was an autonomous decision making body, we said that each team will be empowered to make individual decisions. Another thing that we discussed was explicitly what our (the local teams) relationship was with the "Global Team". Essentially this came down to (paraphrasing here) the Global team typically defers to local team. It seems like this is not really how this has worked thus far if the local bursary team is put together for this purpose at one point, and then a month later the global team ignores that and generates its own. I'm pretty sure that this was just an oversight and part of the general discombobulation about how the local and global parts fit together. Both Hydroxide and Mr. Beige have done their best to represent the local team at the global meetings, and I suspect that the local recruitment for this team at that earlier meeting was simply forgotten. However, there has been tension about this difference which manifested as the various local teams went about their business and began making decisions. So far, the issue has been that non-local people have not being included (most notably in the talks team). I believe that this has been worked out as Hans, from the local talks team, attended the global team meeting on March 31st[4] and a decision was made for a healthy way to include the non-local people in this process. Additionally, I know that the local talks team has been trying to do their best to change this dynamic and are interested in feedback on how to make this better. However, I think this needs to go both ways, if we are going to get to a happy medium where there is both local people meeting in person, and non-local people working together. This takes extra effort on all sides to communicate better. It not only means that the local teams need to strive even more for ways to include non-local people, but the local team should not just be abandoned for the global team and the global team needs to be making steps towards keeping abreast of the what the local team has discussed or decided. In my opinion, we need the global team to make a few strides towards this. Some ideas: the global team meetings, where these decisions are being made, have not been announced to the local team with any reasonable advance notice. They are also scheduled to favor european time, which doesn't really work for many people on the local team. This results in a weird dynamic where these groups are very different and disconnected. In general, it might be better to stop the separation between the two groups and instead of there being a local team and a global team, instead say that we are all part of the Debconf effort. We have different mailing lists and IRC channels, yet this difference is subtle and has not really been needed in any substantive way. It might help eliminate some confusion if we stop have multiple channels and mailing lists. Also, please re-add myself to the sponsorship team, I've CC'd Kris and Clint who also had volunteered, I think they should also be added, but if they decide they would rather abscond, I would understand. Secondly, please update the schedule[5] to reflect the new timeline regarding sponsorship decisions. I'm not exactly clear now what it is supposed to be, but I do know that the March 17th deadline for first-pass sponsorship decisions is *long* past, and I don't know what to tell people who are asking me about this. If I am properly clued in I will try to update it myself. I think I understand it has been turned into May 15th, but there may be other adjustments here that I am not aware of. micah 0. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/Meetings#Local_Team.2C_Feb_14th.2C_2010 1. id:20100319032939.GA8194@amellus.com 2. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/Teams 3. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/Meetings#Global_Team.2C_Wed.2C_March_17.2C_21:00UTC 4. http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2010/debconf-team.2010-03-31-20.00.html 5. http://debconf10.debconf.org/dates.xhtml
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