Re: [DebConf18] Budget Approval Request [2018-06]
Hi
On 14/06/2018 20:16, Chris Lamb wrote:
>> * Increase the budget for bursaries from 60,000 USD to 70,000 USD
>
> I understand that a number of people have had their bursary request
> denied already. How will raising the budget figure into that? In
> addition, how much will this help accomodate more people?
I'll add some context as a newbie on the bursaries team who was part of
the discussion about this in today's meeting.
Nicolas reported that as it stands, about 50 people have been granted
travel bursaries with an overcommit of around USD5k
16:51 < olasd> #info We've been able to grant travel to around 50 people
(40 contributors + 10 outreach) for now, with an overcommit of around 5k USD
I believe the overcommit takes account into people who will not be able
to attend anymore.
He also reports that this includes bursary seekers who reached a score
of about 3.05 out of 5:
16:53 < olasd> fyi, our cutoff score is 3.05/5 which is fairly high
compared to last year
Bursary applicants are rated a score based on a bunch of different
criterea. 3 is already quite high, with most DD's I've seen in the
system getting about 2.5-3.5 (score of 4 is for priority funding for
people who will add significantly to DebConf or do a high-profile talk,
and 5 is "must fund", for cases where it will seriously hurt DebConf if
they don't attend).
It's a fuzzy score and humans ultimately generate it, and even though
decimal points are allowed everywhere many good contributors probably
ended up with a score of 3.0, so I asked olasd what it would cost to
cover that last 0.05 points of people. He said about $10k.
16:54 < highvoltage> olasd: is there an easy way to see how much money
is needed to get to 3.0?
16:54 < olasd> highvoltage: yes, I can tell you : we need 10k USD
So, from a pure economics of scale perspective, I think it's beneficial
for the Debian project to spend a bit more and have a few more high
quality people over, especially since Debian is already spending so much
time and effort on DebConf itself, so I gently urged Yao Wei to take it
into account when revising the budget.
Yes, a lot of people have had their travel declined already. I'm not
sure what their cut-off was but these would be people with a low-enough
score that we can confidently say it's going to be a "no". It also seems
inlikely that someone with a score below 0.99 will ever get travel
sponsorship, so I also think we can really notify them earlier, but
that's a process issue we can discuss for next year.
I hope that helps provide some background, happy to expand on anything
and Nicolas, please correct me if I messed up anywhere.
-Jonathan
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.
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