Re: Budget to Bursaries and Invited Speakers

[David Bremner <david@tethera.net>]

Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@debian.org> writes:

> I will add a data point to this: For DC17 (and partly thanks to the
> generosity of one of our sponsors, that happened to be the employer of
> one of our invited speakers), we only used half of the invited
> speakers budget.
>
> For DC18, we didn't use at all the invited speakers budget.
>
> I am not certain whether I will have the time to continue being the
> Content Team lead (am still willing to, but I'll have to decide closer
> to the beginning of 2019). But my opinion, which seems to be shared by
> the team, is that it is not _required_. Sometimes it's important to
> have specific people invited to tackle from an outsiders' perspective
> specific issues we face, and I guess we *might* invite _somebody_, but
> I cannot justify earmarking US$5000 for this.

When I was leading bursaries, having bursaries rubber stamp requests for
other teams seemed like a bad, non-transparent process to me. So I
pushed to have those expenses visible in the budget, rather than hiding
them in the bursaries line. None of this is to argue with your
assessment of how much is needed, but I'd be a bit sad if the earmark
went away entirely.

d