On Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:49:17 +0200, Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debconf.org> 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. That might be true if we had a clearly defined and agreed on definition of what "exactly the job it was put up to do". But that is not clearly defined, and as a result there are different ideas of what exactly the job the team was put up to do was supposed to do. > [ The following is a reply to Micahs mail in > Message-ID: <[🔎] 8762mwem8r.fsf@algae.riseup.net> ] > > > Is it not true that it would be considered, at minimum, a conflict of > > interest if board members of a 501c3 organization were found funneling > > money to themselves? I would think that it would raise significant > > questions with an auditor who might be looking at an organization's > > taxes. > > > If that is true, then it seems to me a clear conflict of interest that > > board members who requested funding not only got perfect scores, but > > also rated themselves with perfect scores. Wouldn't it appear, from the > > outside, like board members are essentially giving themselves money when > > they ranked themselves perfectly? Or when a husband ranked a wife with a > > perfect score or vice versa? > > > I believe any of those would be considered either as either vested > > interest, nepotism, malfeasance, or at minimum a strong reason for > > excusing oneself for conflict of interest out of concern over causing > > tax problems for the organization. > > > If we want to keep debconf and debian out of tax trouble, a committee > > designed to execute a process that allocates money between themselves > > isn't how its done. > > > Calling this a simple mistake is ignoring a very serious concern. > > Besides the numbers that Jimmy already provided: No board member was or > is able to funnel money at themselve without the approval of another 10 > people. Sorry, but when it comes to corporate malfeasance and appearance of impropriety, that doesn't matter. What matters is that a board member had a say in the process where they were allocated money (and their say was that they should get it). > Yes, this is a problem we did discuss before this (and in the past > years). We can either forbid anyone on the team that has any other > position in SPI, DebConf, Debian, ... as that can be seen as upping > themselve. But that means losing many people who are willing to do such > work (and that are NOT many). How do you know that there aren't many who are willing to do such work? Were there not enough people this time around? Did you have offers of help from people that were not part of the team? Last year we put a public request for people to do that work, and we had a sufficient number of people volunteer and do it. This year there was no similar public request, and so yeah... its going to be hard to find people if that is how it is done. In fact, its still not entirely clear how this was done at all. I would have been willing to do that work, as I was last year (if I would have done that work or not, is another matter!) > And then we had, in the past, the rule to not rate yourself. Which in > the end turned out to punish people for doing the work (no rate, lower > score, WAY down in the sponsorship, and that just because you wanted to > help DebConf). Which changed the policy to "Rate yourself. The rest of > the team WILL rate you down if your request is insane". Which did > happen, this year too. There are other ways to resolve that problem than by having people rate themselves. > Yes, this is not perfect. Short of blocking out many people from helping > out or of allowing every attendee to rank every other in travel money, I > currently fail to see how to do it better. But as I already wrote, I > will be very happy to see a proposal or maybe a working new process come > out of the BoF. Im the first to be happy not to have to do all the work > just to then get complaints to no end because someone who failed a basic > input didn't get money... I think that its obvious that asking the people who thought that the process was fine to come up with something that solves problems that they do not see isn't how its going to work. Of course you fail to see how to do it better, it seems fine to you. If people complain that things were not done fairly and the response is "i dont see the problem, nor do I see how to fix it" and "there isn't anyone else to do the job..." then yeah its going to be the same problem year after year. micah
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