Re: [Debconf-team] My thoughts on reconfirmation, fundraising, etc
Hi Pablo,
On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 12:49:03AM -0400, Pablo Duboue wrote:
> I wholeheartedly agree with the above paragraph. But that still doesn't
> address at least 10-20 people I have peeked on the registration emails which
> are not involved in the project and are clearly taking advantage of our
> sponsored accommodations for a week of tourism in NYC (I like to call them
> $tourists, for obvious reasons). I respect you very much and I have been
> thinking for weeks why it is that you oppose us so strongly to clean up the
> attendee list from these $tourists.
Much of your email would have been unnecessary if I had decided differently
about whether to say a certain bit in my previous email: in the
several-hour-long extended IRC flamewar earlier today, I said that I could
actually agree with asking people to put in a couple of sentences about why
they want to attend. However I didn't think such sentences should have to
reflect pre-existing involvement in debian/debconf/FOSS (i.e. allow any reason
plausibly related to the conference or Debian instead of just the NYC/USA
location). We want potential new blood. Also, even though we can collect the
criteria now I would only like to apply those criteria to actual decisions if
it remains financially necessary after seeing how many people fail to reconfirm
by June 10th.
The main parts of my proposal that I cared about was (1) going ahead now with
the promise of accommodation sponsorship for anyone who requested it timely,
reconfirms timely, shows up, optionally modified by the previous paragraph; (2)
not requiring us to do a second email between now and the reconfirmation
deadline, which would take massive mental energy away from things like
aggressive fundraising or other considerations; and (3) saying that we're still
fundraising in order to be able to confirm food sponsorship but hope to be able
to do so soon, instead of remaining silent on the matter or making it seem
unlikely to happen.
> I'd love to hear it directly from you but so far you only say you oppose
> doing that. My guesses are so far two-fold:
Both reasons are not why I oppose doing that for DC10. I guess I made it a lot
less clear in my calmer email than my heated IRC discussion. (The IRC heat was
multidirectional and a bad idea; everyone involved apologized for the
intensity, including me.) The major, major reason is that it's way too close to
the conference to fairly tighten the criteria beyond what we have been saying
for the entire duration of the registration period.
For reference, what we promised was that "we will try our best to offer food
and accommodation sponsorship to everyone who requests it before April 15th,
but if the number of people requesting sponsorship significantly exceeds
previous years we may have to limit this." The "but" condition did not occur,
thus I feel we have to try our best to honor our promise which people relied
upon in making $employer vacation arrangements and paying travel costs. Giving
people the accommodation promise and accurate food sponsorship status now is an
important part of doing that, and weeding out $tourists is only fair at this
point if we financially have to despite "trying our best".
Thus I'd be fine with the reconfirmation mails saying some version of "If you
don't fill in some reason for attendance that shows us you're actually coming
for the conference and not for the location, you risk losing any food or
accommodation sponsorship you are currently eligible to receive depending on
our financial constraints." (except that this should be reworded to be less
prone to manipulation by $tourists)
Many of your thoughts are highly worth considering in what the requirements
should be in the DC11 and future cycles.
> However, I oppose not cleaning our attendee list on a matter of principle and
> as a DebConf Team member doing fundraising I find not doing so very
> demoralizing. So please explain why you want our sponsors to pay for a person
> who doesn't even care to give us his/her full name and expect us to pay for a
> full week of food and lodging in NYC (yes, we have those, no, it is not only
> one case and no, that person has only 37 pages with his/her alias and the
> keyword "Debian" out of 150,000 for his/her alias in Google).
I also think it's inappropriate for someone not to have given us their full
name, or at least something corresponding to what they go by in their life on a
routine basis. I would be OK with you considering that person not to have
properly registered. :)
Speaking more generally, I think the value of honoring our promises to the best
of our ability, and the resulting goodwill toward us and DebConf from the
Debian community, is worth tolerating the fact that some of the roughly 4% of
the registrants you've identified so far (not a huge percentage!) might be
$tourists IF it doesn't end up straining our finances. You are doing great
great work, which I will continue to help with, and I agree $tourists'
sponsorship should be the first thing sacrificed if need be to make our ends
meet.
> debconf-team$ grep -c '^:' dc9/sponsors-table 30 debconf-team$ grep -c '^:'
> dc10/sponsors-table 70
>
> (the sponsors-table lists each potential sponspor starting with ':')
>
> we have contacted more than double the number of potential leads than last
> year. We're not particularly successful, but we have been trying very hard
> ;-)
That is great effort indeed, but as I pointed out to Clint earlier today, many
of those are cold-calls without any reason to believe that the target company
would want to sponsor. Some of those can work out, but the success rate is
probably lower than the sponsors dc9 contacted. And yes, each of their sponsors
paid a larger percentage of the total cost than for us. Much useful
brainstorming happened on IRC in between verbal battles about additional
fundraising leads to pursue.
> > At least some of them also thought the proposed reductions in sponsorship
> > guarantees were an overreaction.
>
> Point taken. Overreaction aside, the $tourists are an issue that deserves a
> solution even if we were swimming on cash. Being responsible with the money
> is key for recurring fundraising as in the case of DebConf.
Indeed. I don't think any sponsors will object if we tell them in the DebConf10
final report that 95% of attendees were receiving or contributing something
useful from/to Debian by attending the conference. However this should not stop
us from reconsidering the issue well in advance of opening DebConf11
registration.
> > On the other side of the issue, Ana Guerrero, Richard Darst, Pablo Duboue,
> > and Clint Adams were asserting that I was engaging in magical thinking and
> > unreasonably faithful in things
>
> I do think you are engaging in magical thinking and I'm looking forward to
> you using some of that magic to get the money rolling in :-) :-)
I am just extrapolating based on past trends and backing up my statistical
inference with a committment of man-hours. :)
Thanks very much for your thoughtful and dedicated leadership on this issue.
- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy@debconf.org
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