Re: [Debconf-team] [Coordination] Timeline changes proposal for DC16
On 25/08/15 at 11:37 +0200, Giacomo Catenazzi wrote:
>
>
> On 25.08.2015 10:26, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > On 25/08/15 at 09:11 +0200, Gaudenz Steinlin wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > 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.
>
> Note: food and accommodation is really a yes/no. But travel
> sponsorship, which requires a lot more money, is much more difficult. We
> will not have enough money, IMHO, for most of the requests.
Really? Debian currently has >$300k in reserves. If it's important for
Debian to have more sponsored attendees, it probably makes sense to
increase the amount of money we use for that. And then it would become
the Debian project's problem to raise more money on a regular basis (but
we do have ideas about that, such as moving from DebConf-targeted
fundraising to Debian-targeted fundraising, and it's likely that there's
quite a big margin between what we currently raise and what we could raise
with a more organized fundraising infrastructure).
(I'm not saying that the debconf sponsors team is doing a poor job --
they are doing a fantastic job given the options they currently have.
But, for example, compare
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors and
https://www.debian.org/partners/)
Lucas
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