Hello, Jonathan McDowell <noodles@earth.li> wrote on 31/05/2025 at 12:12:50+0200: > Hi. > > I've received an email this morning stating "You have told us that you > would be unable to come to DebConf25 if you were not granted travel > assistance", under a heading of "Accommodation bursary". > > This is not correct; I have not requested travel assistance. I _have_ > requested a food + accommodation bursary, and have received > confirmation of the food bursary. I assume this email was supposed to > tell me I have not been successful in an accommodation bursary? This is a bug in wafer templating. The correct text should have been Your request for an accomodation bursary has been evaluated and ranked. However, we are unable to grant it at this time because our budget is limited, and we had to defer some applications. We will let you know as soon as possible, which may be in a few weeks, if we can grant you the accomodation bursary. > I understand this year sponsorship for DebConf has been much more > limited, to the extent that the normal situation where active project > contributors can expect bursaries is no longer the case. There are a > number of reasons I requested a bursary: > > * There is no alternative accommodation within close walking distance > of the venue. I'm aware of some folks who are in AirBnBs, but there's > no logical alternative that people might congregate - most hotels > seem to be a 40 minute public transport journey away. I would much > rather stay close to where other Debian folk are, as that is part of > the purpose of DebConf to me. > > * It's not clear what the on-site accommodation actually is. To begin > with it wasn't clear if rooms were sharing or not; it now looks like > they are _probably_ single person to a room with shared toilet and > shower facilities, but that doesn't seem certain. If you want to > encourage people to pay for their own accommodation where possible it > helps if they know what they will actually get. Fair, I'll pass it on. > * I have been led to believe by previous DebConf organisers that as a > long time Debian contributor that is sufficient to qualify for > accommodation, and that it is perfectly reasonable for me to do so. > Personally I make the decision that if I am taking the time off work > (my employer does not sponsor my Debian work in any manner) and > paying for my travel that having Debian provide me with food + > accommodation seems like a reasonable trade-off. This is understandable, and in general we agree. Here we ranked people and tried to do our best. I'm sorry if you feel like it's not enough. That being said, the reason you're marked as "ranked" is because by denying travel bursaries, we know some people might cancel their travel and therefore that some accomodation will become available again. > I do appreciate the hard work that goes into organising DebConf, but > I'm aware of several bids in the past that have not gone forward > because of the realisation sponsored accommodation would be the > blocking factor. If that's the case _anyway_ then can I suggest there > needs to be some modification of evaluating future DebConf bids? We have a reasonable amount of rooms, we just have a lot of sponsorship requests and as I stated on -vote and -private, the debconf budgets have been negative and we needed to be a bit more cautious. We also need to figure out where we are in terms of availability. I acknowledge that this is not perfect, and even though it's a small consolation, I'd like to extend my apologies towards you. -- PEB
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