Re: [Debconf-team] Early travel sponsorship

[Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org>]

Moray Allan dijo [Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 10:06:34PM +0000]:
> >  Select people that are, initially farthest from me (or from all the
> >  team members) in the web of trust, probably in small batches, as ding
> >  this one at a time will take too long.
> >
> 
> I don't have an opinion on whether this bit is sensible without seeing what
> it means in practice
> 
> (I suspect, due to mass keysigning, that it will come close to giving the
> people with greatest overall mean-shortest-distance, which could mean
> people who least enjoy attending events themselves, or perhaps people who
> live in the most remote locations.  If the results are too warped that way,
> it might work better to select people randomly, with weights proportional
> to, say d^alpha where d is this distance measure.)

I agree with you here... Although the GPG WoT does carry *some*
measure of whom does each person know, "knowing" is a very subjective
word. I think we are unlikely to get much better results than from a
random sample.

> >  Ask the nominee if they're willing, and not in need of sponsorship
> >  themselves.
> 
> As I've said in the past, I think the
> not-applying-for-sponsorship-themselves point is sensible/important.  It
> should perhaps also be applied to the victims from the previous stage, so
> that they aren't influenced to choose people likely to favour themselves.

We have in the past decided not to vote for/against ourselves. Yes,
the committee should ideally not be the least worried about this - But
then again, I don't think it's _so_ sensible. We have trusted people
to be objective/neutral, and although there are unhappy people, I
believe there will always be, no matter how fair the resulting system
is.