Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> writes: >> > >> > From past experience, the bursaries needs more than one months. The important part is travel sponsorship, especially for Cape Town, and this take much time. But let’s see commentary of bursaries team. (OTOH on your timeline, we have 2 months before opening registration and an additional month before sponsored registration close, so enough time. >> > >> > On past we had A queue and B-C-… queues. Possibly only A queue is >> > processed in such timeline (and other people are notified about they >> > status), so that when sponsored people cancel, we can move fund to the >> > next one. >> >> One month for bursaries is tight, but doable if we are well prepared. 1 >> 1/2 months would be better. It mostly needs someone to drive the process >> as David did it this year. >> >> At the bursaries Bof we thought that the idea of sponsoring more people >> as others cancel or don't need the sponsorship anymore worked quite well >> this year. So we will continue to do that. > > This sounds wrong to me. For me, the role of bursaries is to decide, for > a specific attendee, if s/he should be sponsored to attend or not. > That's a yes/no question (a hard one, but still). If you end up needing > more budget to cover the sponsorship for all those that should be > sponsored, just ask for more money from Debian. I disagree that it's just a yes/no question. It's a ranking on two dimensions (contributions to Debian and financial need of the sponsoree). And for both it's not always obvious where to make the cut. > > But deciding that someone's attendance is not worth getting sponsored, > and then, in the end, sponsoring it, sounds like throwing money out of > the window. And on the other hand, deciding that someone should not be > sponsored based on the initial assumption of the sponsorship budget, > even if that person's attendance would be beneficial to DebConf/Debian, > is a net loss for Debian. To be clear on this, it was never the plan to sponsor people that we think were not worth it. We decided on a cutoff based on the contributions to Debian score beforehand. So IMO there is no risk of wasting money. But even above the clear cut agreed by the bursaries team I think there is a tradeoff where spending extra money is not beneficial to Debian. Think of someone that was OK by a little margin based on his contributions and indicated that he is not applying based on financial need. Should we extend the budget to sponsor this person? For those interested in more details about the process, there is some documentation in https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debconf-data/dc15.git/tree/bursaries Gaudenz
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