Sponsoring event attendees

[Igor Pires Soares]

Em Sáb, 2012-02-18 às 14:58 -0600, inode0 escreveu:
> One of the things that has always seemed unfair to me about the
> process is that generally tickets are considered in the order they are
> created. I don't understand why being quick to ask for a subsidy
> should make it more likely you will receive a subsidy. That isn't
> mentioned as a consideration anywhere in our subsidy guidelines as
> being something we should consider or weigh. In the past I have
> wondered how we could improve this so the requests are considered in a
> more sensible order.
> 
> I have only one idea and it is far from perfect as it adds more people
> and more process to what already exists. But I'll toss it out for your
> consideration. Could we just have a request deadline? At the point the
> deadline arrives we shake the requests up in a hat so the order they
> came in is irrelevant to the rest of the process. Either the folks
> already involved or some other volunteers would then go through *all*
> of the requests ranking them based loosely on the criteria stated in
> the subsidy guidelines. We sum these rankings up in order to determine
> the order the requests are considered. My hope is that this would
> result in more high value requests being funded and fewer at the
> margin before the limit is reached. Some special consideration needs
> to be retained in the process for those who are fairly local or
> otherwise very inexpensive for us to help and for those with special
> skills that might be desired at the particular event. And I think all
> requests for travel between regions (as defined by Fedora) should be
> dealt with as special cases and not as a part of the general process.

Hi John,

I think that we definitely need to establish a deadline. As Robyn
mentioned we already have done that, but need to be more firm about it.
In the past even with a deadline some people who filed their requests
late got their tickets reviewed and approved anyway.

The idea of ranking the requests sounds perfectly reasonable but we need
to be very clear about who is eligible to make this rank. In the case of
FUDCons I think that FAmSCo, local organizers and the FPL should be
directly involved. But for regional major events such FISL or FOSDEM I
don't think that is feasible to involve all of them in all events. In
such cases I'd rather involve a regional mentor and a FAmSCo member who
might be willing to help in this particular event. Together they could
go through all the requests as you said and present the final result in
a wiki page, for instance. 

For sure some people will be offended with the evaluation made by the
eligible ones and might question the fairness and the transparency of
the process. From my past experiences there is no easy way to deal with
it. It needs tact and time for people to cool off.

-- 
Igor Pires Soares
Fedora Ambassador (Brazil) - Member of FAmSCo
Fedora I18N/L10N QA
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Igor