Re: [Debconf-team] decentralization of travel sponsorship
Gaudenz Steinlin <gaudenz@debian.org> writes:
> In general I very much like your proposal. I (as a bursaries team member
> in the last years) think it's a big improvement over the situation in
> the past. I have one concern though. I think it might be hard for teams
> to estimate their budget amount early enough and splitting this into
> many budget items will lead to a lot of unused funds because it's much
> more likely teams will stay below their budget than go over their
> budget. We at least need a good way to reclaim this money for other
> teams or the general bursaries budget.
Yes, I can see your point about splitting into too many pots, and that
people may not yet have a good intuition about their particular team.
On the other hand, we do need to decide how much to spend on volunteer
travel, room and board overall. It makes more sense to me to do that as
part of the budget process. In terms of reclaiming money, one idea I've
discussed with a few people is to wait list people up to say 1.25 x
times the budget amount. Then when the inevitable cancellations come
in, we can work down the wait list. I'm not sure if this makes as much
sense on the volunteer side, so perhaps we can throw the leftovers from
both pools into one pot to deal with the wait list and exceptional
cases.
> What about a slightltly different process: Each team lead/shadow
> evaluate the applications from their team and tell bursaries how much
> money they ideally need. After bursaries has ranked it's applications
> there is a meeting with the team leads and bursaries where we decide
> how much money goes to each team and how much to the general bursaries
> budget. Like this there is much more information about how much money
> each team needs when the decision is made. I also think that this
> process is less bureaucratic.
I don't really object to the idea of one meeting to allocate all of the
volunteer sponsorship money, and I guess some people from bursaries can
advise this meeting, but as I said above, I'd rather the overall
breakdown between "normal" sponsorship and "volunteer" sponsorship is is
decided beforehand. Part of my whole motivation here is to make this
breakdown more transparent.
d
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