Re: Expense Rules for Mini-DebConfs

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Didier" == Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <odyx@debian.org> writes:


    Didier> Fair enough.  But then I wonder what guidelines will be used
    Didier> to grant, amend, or deny travel support budgets. Surely not
    Didier> "any" budget is fine (or is it)? I tend to think it'd be of
    Didier> great support for the BSP organizers to know in which
    Didier> ballpark the travel support budget should fall.

I don't have guidelines for the budget, but I do have rough guidelines
I'm using for approving individual requests.  Different DPLs will handle
this differently, but I think DDs can look at
git@salsa.debian.org:treasurer-team/documentation on the dpl branch in
the conference-funding-criteria.md branch.  Those thoughts were focused
around thinking of travel to non-Debian events (you ask to go present at
some other conference) but also generally useful for all travel.

There have been two corner cases in my entire term where thought was
required at my level.  It's almost certain that DebConf burrseries team
has hard decisions to make, but those  don't tend to bubble up to me.

Most of what I see is really easy.

You haven't been contributing in over a year and have no specific plans
to contribute?  Thanks for your interest, but come back when you're more
active.

You're heavily involved in the cloud team and you want to go to the
cloud sprint?  Sure, go for it.

Once we've decided to approve an activity, I generally trust people to
be responsible in what reimbursements they ask for.  Yes, I check and
make sure we are permitted to cover it (as do the TOs), but at least for
individual requests that make it to me, I'm generally happy with what
people are requesting.  Some people ask for more than others, but some
people have more constrained personal budgets than others.  I'm not
going to pry into someone's personal finances.

I think more consistency and more rules is required for Debian events
than for one-off requests to the DPL.
And obviously DebConf itself will have the most rules and procedure.
I think that's OK.

--Sam