On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:22:48 +0000, Moray Allan <moray@sermisy.org> wrote: > 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. Definitely not -- that's what I meant by asking people to do their ordering as though they were solely responsible -- if they know that one person is claiming 5 times what someone else asked for the same route, then I think it's fine for some or all of them to decide to penalise the applicant for that. I also don't think we should have guidelines for doing that, although suggesting it as a possible criterion to judge by would be fine -- that way, the average of the people's decisions about such issues should be reasonably representative of the project as a whole, if our selection criteria is random enough. > - 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. Could work, although I'd rather just let people in possession of as many facts as we can give them, just do the ordering without discussing it amongst themselves -- committees make crappy decisions rather often, and generally do not settle on what one might have though was the average view of the people, but rather rush to extremes, bizarrely, so let's try to avoid a committee. > 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. I think that should just be pointed out as background advice, and people can then decide if they think one person is worth more than the ten people below them. > - 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. I rather doubt that there is a high correlation between people's ability at self-promotion, and whether we want to sponsor them. In fact the most timid and shy people are quite likely to be the ones we should be trying hardest to drag into daylight, so asking for people to explain how brilliant they are will eliminate them before we even start. Perhaps we should allow people to request sponsored travel on behalf of others to offset that. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] http://www.hands.com/ |-| HANDS.COM Ltd. http://www.uk.debian.org/ |(| 10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London E18 1NE ENGLAND
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