Dear -publicity team,
a few months ago Joey Hess advanced to the past DPL the proposal of
giving explicit DebConf(10) travel sponsoring to non-regular DebConf
attendees. The rationale is that DebConfs are mostly attended by
regulars and that explicitly supporting travel for non-regulars can be
important to motivate some people to work on Debian.
The "some people" can be current project members which are less
motivated that in the past, as well as non-project member which are
active but not (yet) willing to contribute more or become project
members, new project members "too shy" to request sponsoring, and the
like.
We do have have the money to sponsor some of those trips, and Joey has
agreed to take care of the rest (like drafting application procedures
and deciding about who'll get sponsored and how much, within the limits
of the total budget I'll allocate).
What we now need ... is "buzz" :-) Personally, I'd like to have either a
dedicated blog post (on the debconf blog?) or a press release, whatever
you think it would have more chances of attract interested people. The
idea was already mentioned in the final bits from Steve on d-d-a [1],
but IMHO it deserves an explicit communication.
What do you think? Would it be worth to have that communication?
If you think it is, I'll happily leave up to you, in coordination with
Joey, to prepare an announcement. Keep in mind that the goal is to
sponsor the travel of people which can "contribute" the most at the
conference, hopefully getting back enthusiastically in Debian
afterwords. A side-thought I have in my mind is to let team-mates
_propose_ some of their co-workers in case they know they did not
register (for shyness reasons) and in case they consider that a pity.
Enough of a talk, thanks for your communication work!
Cheers.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/04/msg00000.html
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature