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.
Ah, sure. I was missing that you meant for people to include that in their ranking (because it wasn't included at this stage previously).
> 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.
Right. Though depending how the individual rankings are combined, the problem might get reintroduced when they're combined (in my example, it's unlikely voters will choose precisely the same people to come ahead of the expensive person, even if they all thought that others should come ahead).
> - 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.
I agree that asking for completions of "I'm brilliant and should come to DebConf because..." is unlikely to give the right ranking directly, but I think that not asking for information falls back even more heavily on how much people have promoted themselves on lists/Planet/etc. -- I was wondering if we could ask for information (e.g. a list of areas where someone works on Debian?) with the aim of helping some of the quiet people whose names voters won't instantly recognise, but who make great contributions to the project. This would save voters some time grepping the lists and reading QA pages (and so perhaps increase the pool of people who will agree to be voters), but is especially relevant for people whose work is only visible in VCS commits, unpublished logs of user support on #debian, etc.
--
Moray