On 19-10-02 10 h 43, Sam Hartman wrote: > > TL;DR: Do we want BSP organizers to take on the responsibility of > batching together travel reimbursement requests. > > HI. A while back, I suspended the automatic approval of reimbursements > for attending BSPs. You can still ask for approval for attending a > BSP, you can't just send me a reimbursement request with no approval. > > We had a bit of discussion about how things ought to/might work here. > Holger proposed that it would make more sense for the people running > BSPs to batch approvals kind of like we do for sprints and > mini-DebConfs. > > If we want to do things that way, no action is required on my part. I > am very willing to approve such budgets, and even to amend such budgets > if it looks like more people are coming. But I do actually want to see > them ahead of time, just so I know what's going on. > > So, if we're generally happy with BSP organizers putting together a > travel budget and handling who will get reimbursed, then I think the > next step is to write up how to do that on the wiki. > I'd appreciate it if someone would volunteer to do that. > If you get text together, please drop treasurer@debian.org a note asking > for review (that also reaches me). > > Asking BSP organizers to help with this is great from the DPL side. > The only concern is if it pushes the effort involved in organizing a > BSP up too much so people don't want to do it. > > If that ends up being the case I'm happy with some sort of automatic > approval process for DDs attending BSPs (and easy approval for other > contributors when that makes sense). > But let's figure out if we want BSP organizers to handle this first. I've taken part in organising sprints, miniconfs, DebConfs and BSPs before and although I salute the effort to make the BSP reimbursement process easier for everyone, I think we should instead work on a common set of solutions for all Debian-related reimbursements. I don't really see why we should have 4 different processes for BSPs, miniconfs, sprints and DebConfs. Here are a few problems I've met before: 1. Dealing with multiple TOs When dealing with multiple TOs, the main problem I see is the lack of clear communication between TOs, the DPL and the organisers. 1.1 How is Debian France to know if person X has been reimbursed by SPI for the same approved expenses? 1.2 When the DPL approves a group budget and people ask to be reimbursed by different TOs, how should we handle individual requests? Should the "plus or minus 10%" be applied to individual requests or to the group budget? I think the reimbursement process should make clear who is to be reimbursed by whom and the DPL-signed email that approves expenses should also specify this information. 2. Lack of clear deadlines It's a PITA for organisers and TOs when people take a very long time to send their reimbursement requests. We should establish clear deadlines for the reimbursement process (3 months max after the event?). Life happens and there can be individual exceptions, but having clear deadlines creates good incentives. 3. Lack of agreement on what is reimbursed As pointed by others in this thread, we don't have clear guideline on: * visa costs * food during travel * food during the event * accommodation At the moment, it highly depends on the DPL in place and what people ask for. 4. Different tools used to keep track of shit All the TOs use different systems to keep track of reimbursement requests. To a certain level, that's fine, but it complicates everyone's life. What I would like to see deployed is a tool similar to nm.debian.org (a clear frontend for a process that is mainly email-based) that would track the different steps of a reimbursement request. One could see what the steps for a particular reimbursement request are (different TOs ask for different documents) and easily check the status of the request. Most of all, TOs could see who's supposed to reimburse who, what has been reimbursed by other TOs when, etc. -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Louis-Philippe Véronneau ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ pollo@debian.org / veronneau.org ⠈⠳⣄
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