Re: [Debconf-team] Rethinking the way travel sponsorship works
Hi Gaudenz, hi all,
Le mardi, 14 mai 2013 23.44:06, Gaudenz Steinlin a écrit :
> Making the whle process fully public was already rejected in previous
> discussions. I agree that this might be too much. But to balance
> accountability towards the project with the need for privacy for those
> requesting sponsorship I think we could at least announce the list of
> persons who were granted travel sponsorship (without amounts).
I think that this would be a too big hit on privacy of the beneficiaries of
travel sponsorship: the "amount-name" relationship is too sensitive to be
published. Publishing how much the Debian project gave to support who's travel
IMHO introduces all sort of social biases in unsuspected ways: one's employer,
partner, friends, family, etc, get to know that "one can't even afford a trip
to $country", to take a simple example outside Debian. It also helps to game
the system in future years: "oh, that other DD in my area asked for $amount, I
can probably get the same even if I don't need it". Even if we try very hard
to add all sorts of metrics to help the rating, the team is still a set of
humans applying their common sense on requests that are money-sensitive for
the affected individuals. That will inevitably lead to having to ''take
decisions''.
On the other hand, I very much understand the need for transparency: the
project spends money from sponsors to help contributors' attendance (but
that's equally true for accomodation or food sponsorship). We need to be able
to publicly describe how the travel sponsorship money was spent. I therefore
propose to either publish a sorted list of anonymised amounts, such as [0]:
^ Amount ^ Country of departure ^ Project status (DD/DM/…) ^
or publish a alphabetically sorted list of beneficiaries' names, aka "the
persons from that list got part of their travel expenses sponsored" [1]. In
any case, if the names are to be published, we must tell the requesters before
starting the rating process.
> This would allow for at least basic oversight of the process by outsiders.
As I tried to explain above, publishing only part of the output (the full
output would have each of the raters' scores and also the list of people that
didn't get the sponsorship) of the team's work will IMHO increase the
frustration instead of getting the benefit of that "basic oversight".
We can't reach full transparency because there _will_ always be special cases
that lead to a team decision. I think it's better for all parties to setup a
team that is empowered to take these decisions in a discretionary manner
instead of imposing transparency of the granted amounts.
Cheers,
OdyX
[0] Of course the third column can help un-anonymising some entries.
[1] The full list with names should be accessible to DPL and auditors, but not
to the wide public or the (less-)wide DD population IMHO.
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