On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Philip Hands
<phil@hands.com> wrote:
Then, for the allocation of funds, just ask people to place people in
order of preference as though they were solely and personally
responsible for allocating the funds, possibly including a couple of
markers, like "Should Fund above" and "Should not fund below" -- then we
shove that lot into Condorcet and hope something vaguely useful pops out
the other end.
ICBW but I'm not sure Condorcet is sensible for a multi-winner election?
A couple of other things that should perhaps be taken into account here:
- In an ideal world, I don't think we would do travel money allocation completely independently each year. While a new method for choosing voters might increase the variation in results between years, making the problem less bad, if you suppose that we magically knew the correct fair ordering of everyone, I don't think we should simply allocate the money to the same top-ranking people each year, but spread it further down the list. (If we ignore this question for this year, we might at least start to keep more accessible records of how much money has been allocated to who, without other private information, that can be used in future years, if desired, to even things out a bit.)
- In an ideal world, I don't think we should ignore the amounts of money being requested. While it's clearly hard to make judgements between specific individuals, if you imagine a case where person N on the list will cost the same amount of money to transport as people N+1, N+2, ... N+10, it might make sense to bring the ten following people before person N. In practice, we *do* see big variations between flight costs; this isn't merely a hypothetical problem. (I also realise that we might need to take into account the reasons for high flight costs, and e.g. whether they're likely to be lower the following year.)
- To deal directly with the most common case of that: just as we had a separate pot of money for "DebConf newbies" in the last couple of years, it might make sense to have separate pots for regional vs. distant people. It's hard to trade off the two cases when looking at individual people, so it might be easier to make an overall split of the money. It's good to bring people to DebConf from far away, but it's also an efficient use of Debian money to bring people to years when they are relatively closer to the venue. (What is considered "regional" would vary between years depending on how travel prices look to the destination, rather than being defined as a specific level of distance.)
- It would be fair to require some more explicit information from people seeking travel money, to make the voters' job easier. We should also perhaps also require people who receive it (and if so probably anyone who received sponsored accommodation/food) to write something about what they did at DebConf, and keep that information such that it could potentially be used in future decision-making.
--
Moray