Re: [Debconf-team] Call for Help: DebConf14 Bursaries Team
On Mon, 12 May 2014 01:51:28 -0700
"Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (faw)" <faw@debian.org> wrote:
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> Hi all,
>
> We are assembling this year's Bursaries Team to help us rate the
> travel sponsorship and food/accommodation requests for DebConf14.
> We will follow most of the past years' procedures, always trying
> to improve on, specially on transparency.
>
> Are you interested in helping us? Read on! :-)
>
>
> What is this "Bursaries Team" all about?
>
> The Bursaries Team has a very important role in DebConf: they
> are responsible for evaluating requests for sponsorship, both
> food/accommodation and travel. Funds for sponsorship are
> limited, so this team has the difficult task of ranking
> sponsorship requests to ensure that these funds are put to the
> best use for Debian.
>
> Obviously, the problem is much harder than just assigning the
> money to the various _tasks_ we have to do, as this decision
> directly affects individuals. We have tried in the past to
> include in our team people from various areas of Debian, from
> different geographic origins, even with different group of
> friends, in order to avoid "clique-based" rating, or in any way
> biasing the results.
>
> Once again we are repeating the idea of broad call for help, using
> d-d-a to hopefully reach a bigger part of Debian, as it is Debian
> funds we will be using and it is Debian-related people (whether
> DDs, DMs or other contributors) we will be assigning it to.
>
>
> What do we need from those who volunteer?
>
> The deadline for requesting sponsorship is on Thursday 2014-05-15,
> and we are aiming at producing the results by Sunday 2014-04-25 to
> give sponsored attendees time to get good prices on plane tickets.
> We have a week where you'll need to concentrate your work/time so
> we can produce our results and delivery them on time.
>
> First, to be part of the Bursaries Team you can't request travel
> sponsorship for yourself, the goal here is to avoid influencing
> the decision process, and also to reduce legal risks for fiscal
> sponsors.
>
> Second, some time and patience. You will have to go through the
> amount of people requesting travel sponsorship (you can expect
> it to be between 50-150 people), look at their reasoning as to
> why they are requesting it, how reasonable their requested amount
> sounds (yes, "reasonable" is too broad a word -- the team will
> have to decide about it), and rate numerically. Usually, once
> the requests are rated, we define a cutoff value.
>
> Third, an extra bit of time and patience. We will try to
> coordinate asynchronously by email, but an IRC meeting might be
> necessary to make the final decisions, ensure the produced list
> looks sane, and to find any hiccups before they explode. And if
> they explode, believe me, it can be ugly. But they don't have
> to explode at all, as we are nice and careful ;-)
>
> Finally, to meet the requests for transparency, we have to report
> our work, without breaching the privacy of the people who request
> this sponsorship (again, as this is a very personal, social and
> money-related topic, it can be very touchy). So, the work will
> not finish as soon as we deliver the list, but somewhat later,
> quite probably a bit after DebConf itself.
>
> Again: You don't have to be a DebConf long-time organizer nor
> attendee. You don't have to be a many-years-long DD. We want
> the group to be diverse, and that *surely* includes people that
> simply are not in the same intra-Debian demographic group that
> most of us are.
>
> We are aiming to have a group of ~10 people to be large enough,
> but not too large. So, if you want to be a part of the team,
> please reply to debconf-team @ lists.debconf.org letting us know.
>
> As you might notice we are on a short schedule, so please, reply
> as soon as possible, before 2014-05-16 (Friday).
>
I'd like to help with this, I'm a DebConf contributor since DC11, mostly of my work is in registration, visa and do some in herb for DC12 :)
Regards,
--
Norman García <norman@riseup.net>
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