Re: [Debconf-team] Special sponsorship
On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 08:49:17AM +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
>
> > People are denied travel sponsorship every year. This year, it
> > included a very active Debian community member, Clint Adams. I am
> > further disappointed in this decision as Clint was key to DebConf10.
> > I don't think Clint should be left out like this. The argument from
> > the travel sponsorship team will be "excluded on a technicality", but
> > I (and others) do not care: If the team can not manage to give money
> > to the most deserving people, regardless of technicalities, I think
> > the team isn't doing its job.
>
> Most of the stuff already got answered in the thread, so I won't go over
> all points.
>
> The argument is "excluded because he got rated with such a low score
> that he ended up below the cutoff rate". That this happened is, to a big
> part, caused by him giving a very terse reason why he should be
> sponsored and what he is doing in Debian.
> Saying "the team isn't doing its job" is just wrong. The team did
> exactly the job it was put up to do. You might not like the outcome for
> whatever reason, but naming the team an incompetent lot is just wrong.
I am not saying that the team isn't following some criteria it made
up. I am saying it did not help to get the most deserving people to
DebConf.
Example: the travel sponsorship team decides to rank people by
penta_id: lower penta_id ==> has been attending DebConf longer ==>
more deserving. The team distributes money based on this criteria.
The team says "we did our job, we rated people and exactly followed
the criteria."
People would rightfully complain about this, since
Second, in my opinion, the way a team maintains legitimacy is via
transparency. Once I pointed to a wiki page [wiki-travel] and asked
"can you comment on this?". Ganneff responded "that's not how it
worked", I invited Ganneff to correct it, and got no further comment
on either IRC or wiki page improving.
[wiki-travel] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/TravelSponsorship
Not everyone has time to document what they are doing as they are
doing it. But at least upon request, there should be explanations of
what was done.
The reason there are humans on the team, and there is a human meeting,
is to provide _human input_. People should notice "this is not a
valid reason" or "this person actually does a lot". There are very
simple ways to justify this:
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=$their_email_address&comaint=yes
search("$their_name site:lists.debian.org")
search("$their_name site:bugs.debian.org")
search("$their_name site:debian.org") - which gets everything
This is not an entire picture, people who don't show up on here can
deserve travel sponsorship, too - in which case one should probably
check those things.
This roughly what a (much smaller) team did last year when searching
for who should get accommodation sponsorship last year, but they can
elaborate if they want.
Can you elaborate on the purpose and discussion taken in the team
meeting where things were decided?
Am I the only one who thinks that the team should not blindly follow
whatever is written in a text field, but pull in their own knowledge
(as can be backed up by the methods shown above).
- Richard
--
| Richard Darst - rkd@ - boltzmann: up 730 days, 15:14
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| "Ye shall know the truth and -- the truth shall make you free"
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