Re: [Debconf-team] make bed selection a lottery
Holger Levsen dijo [Mon, Apr 08, 2013 at 02:53:03PM +0200]:
> instead of turning DebConf13 into a travel agency which will have to manage
> requests, demands and complaints (even more than we already have to deal with
> every year) and giving richer people an opportunity to buy their beds of
> choice and forcing poorer people into left-over beds, I suggest a completly
> different protocol:
>
> Do a lottery. announce it as a lottery and do such.
>
> Maybe we could give everybody 5 tickets (for free if sponsored) and allow them
> to buy more tickets for say, 50 CHF per ticket. (And a ticket could just mean
> drawing a random number between 1 and 1000.)
> (...)
> This is a bit unpredicatble, but it's also fair(er) and rather predictable
> that its unpredicatable too.
> (...)
> I'm sorry to not have come up with a more solid proposal about this yet, but I
> think its a good start and definitly better then making an already quite-
> money-centric debconf even more money-centric. We are divided by money all the
> time, and even more, while doing DebConf in Switzerland. The pricing-room-
> proposal will widen this gap even more, while this lottery proposal aims at
> lessing this gap a little bit at least.
I think this would not be a wise move. If somebody were to have paid a
fee to have their minimum-acceptable sleeping standards in, and the
lottery puts them on the 30-people-sleepingbag spot, they will
probably just regard the money they gave to the lottery as a donation
and not attend.
If, OTOH, another person is fine with sleeping on a tent but gets sent
to a nice single bed room, this person might be just very very very
glad with luck, and not feel any obligation to trade spaces with that
other unfortunate soul. Lottery says I can sleep like a king, and like
a king I shall sleep.
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