On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 03:03:46PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote: > Richard Darst writes ("DebConf travel sponsorship"): > > But there is something we could do: "Summon Bigger Bank". We would > > basically want something to even out the year to year uncertainty, > > and average out the travel sponsorship over years. And we do have a > > bigger bank: Debian. > > It is astonishing to me that we have this problem every year. And > every year people (me included) make the same suggestion. > > But for some reason it doesn't happen
Weeeeell, that probably means that making the suggestion is not enough to make it happen, someone actually need to make it happen :-) Irony aside, part of the problem is that a lot of people outside the DebConf orga team --- quite naturally, for sure --- remember about this problem when it touches all of us, i.e. yearly at the time of travel sponsorship (late) confirmation. And at that time we have all the nice and useful discussions that are needed to solve the problem. But then --- quite naturally again, but not really usefully --- everybody except the DebConf orga team forget about the issue until the next year. The DebConf orga team has *a lot* to do and is improving steadily every single aspect of DebConf, year after year. But maybe that's not yet enough to make this specific problem disappear. So, first obvious suggestion, if you are not in the DebConf orga team and if you haven't worked to solve this specific problem, please at least remember about this issue *after* this DebConf cycle. Everything we are going to say *right now* has no chance to get implemented this year. Partly because it's late and partly because the DebConf orga team will likely be very busy with DebConf12 until mid-July. The money problem is not the real problem here. The real problem is organization [1]. I'm by no means opposed to the idea of advancing money to grant travel sponsorship. It is just that no one have ever asked for that until it's already too late, at least for the past 3 years. Which brings us back to the topic of helping with the organization. The only monetary constraint we have agreed with the DebConf team, is the general goal of having DebConf be an amortized zero cost event. But that totally allows to have one year deficit and one year surplus, as Ian observed. As already discussed on debconf-team, the ideas of promoting some specific DebConf activities as more general Debian services (e.g. travel sponsorship assignment, that could be useful also to sprint, if they grow in volume) are perfectly fine. And there is people working on implementing those ideas. Join them! [2] Cheers. PS setting M-F-T: debconf-team, as this discussion really belongs there [1] I posit that thing are a bit more complicate than people seem to believe, because to grant travel sponsorship much earlier you need deadlines much earlier --- as in 3-4 months earlier. And those deadlines will be too soon for at least some people. So now you've to split an early and late deadline, as most conferences do. Which is fine, but goes a bit against fairness as the two bunch of people will be evaluated separately rather than in a big bucket, etc. I see nothing insurmountable and unsolvable given good will and enough volunteers, but I don't think it's as easy as it seems either. [2] all the encouragements contained in this mail are not specific to Ian, of course, but general to the lurker public as a whole -- Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o . Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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