Re: [Debconf-team] Discussing our budgeting and sponsorship situation
On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 01:10:41AM -0400, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote:
> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 10:16:39PM -0400, Richard Darst wrote:
> > They are actually worse than we thought last night, not better:
>
> All great points. Some countervailing good news: as people fail to reconfirm by
> June 10, we will regain some meaningful chunk of food/lodging/travel money.
> Everything else said in this thread is quite useful to consider.
This is kind of tricky, a lot of people can not confirm if they do not know
about food/lodging status.
I would not be surprised if there are people who have bought the plane tickets
but if they have to pay lodging+food they will be forced to lose this money and
just don't go because they can not afford more.
They numbers are not good, so what about send the email asking people to
reconfirm (and remove "I want to attend" if they won't come for sure), explain
them how expensive is to host them, promising lodging (the expensive part),
and do not grant food at all?
You always can subsist a week with bad food and people tend to get very good
ideas to save money here (we are in a dorm, so I guess it gives us some
interesting ideas?), but certainly people need a place to sleep. (*)
(*) I know the case of somebody who tried to slept a couple of nights in the
main talks room last year until Montaña kicked him out.. :-)
About one of the points of Richard's email:
> - We look through DebConf attendees food/accommodation sponsorship .
> This is harder to tell who deserves sponsorship or not, since we
> want it open to as many people as possible. Our proposed starting
> point is to allow food sponsorship to everyone, and limit
> accommodation sponsorship to those with some preexisting
> relationship to Debian (being very flexible here), and a team would
> have to be dispatched to make these decisions (expected savings:
> ???)
I suggest mailing people who asked sponsored food+accommodation and ask them
to file in penta the "What are you doing for Debian? Why do you request
sponsorship?" field. I do *not* know if it is the case this year, but
last year it was only filed for people asking travel sponsorship.
If you are going to give bed and food to somebody who is not known in Debian,
it is fair ask them why they are interested in the conference.
I do not think we should give room/food to people who fails to explain why
they want to come to DebConf. Personally, I am ok sponsoring people who are
Debian users, people who works in other free software projects, family of
localteam, etc. DebConf has been running for some years now, I believe
there are rumours about "free holidays week" and people try to get this.
Again, I do not know about this year data, but it was a trend I saw last year
even with Cáceres not being such a popular holidays destination if you
compare to NY.
> - Establish a team to review Debcamp work plans, and make decisions
> about if we can afford to sponsor those people. Possibly look at
> alternative accommodations (hostels, MrBeige's place), ask that they
> pay their own way. (expected savings: ~4,000-10,000 )
>
I also suggest mailing people here but this time being more strict than
in the normal conference week.
Ana
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