Didier 'OdyX' Raboud dijo [Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:31:54AM +0200]: > I think that this would be a too big hit on privacy of the beneficiaries of > travel sponsorship: the "amount-name" relationship is too sensitive to be > published. Publishing how much the Debian project gave to support who's > travel > IMHO introduces all sort of social biases in unsuspected ways: one's > employer, > partner, friends, family, etc, get to know that "one can't even afford a trip > to $country", to take a simple example outside Debian. It also helps to game > the system in future years: "oh, that other DD in my area asked for $amount, > I > can probably get the same even if I don't need it".
Right. I share your concerns. I think the information I would be comfortable disclosing are aggregated (or even individual) numbers, stating total travel amount, amount requested/granted by us, and *at most* a coarse geographical area. So, say, we would report that "we funded CHF7500 of travel expenses (out of CHF10,350, with CHF2,850 paid by the sponsorees) for the attendance of 6 people coming from North America". Maybe also the percentage of people requesting sponsorship that got it — "We managed to sponsor the travel of 45 out of the 70 people that requested it". > On the other hand, I very much understand the need for transparency: the > project spends money from sponsors to help contributors' attendance (but > that's equally true for accomodation or food sponsorship). We need to be able > to publicly describe how the travel sponsorship money was spent. I therefore > propose to either publish a sorted list of anonymised amounts, such as [0]: > > ^ Amount ^ Country of departure ^ Project status (DD/DM/…) ^ This could work this year, say, for people from Europe. however, if we were to find a line saying that a Mexican DD got CHF3000, I'm sure I'd get somebody questioning as to why am I travelling on business class on Debian funds. Maybe I'd agree not *publishing* this list, but formally agreeing to disclose the (full, with names) list to DDs requesting it, subject to treatment similar to debian-private (or even posting the list to debian-private). I still don't like the idea of being able to single out individuals, but I could agree to this. > > This would allow for at least basic oversight of the process by outsiders. I'm not sure if I care about outsiders here. Yes, we want to show sponsors we give good use of their money. But I care more about insiders who have shown their lack of happiness with the current scheme. _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
