Sponsoring event attendees

[inode0]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 6:48 PM, Igor Pires Soares <igorsoares at gmail.com> wrote:
> Em Ter, 2012-02-14 às 07:49 -0700, Robyn Bergeron escreveu:
>> However, I have some additional input here.  For the Tempe FUDCon, we
>> made the case that we were having additional people from each region
>> come to participate to learn how to run a FUDCon, and to bring that
>> knowledge back to their respective regions.  And to that, I say, MISSION
>> ACCOMPLISHED, we now have plenty of people with the knowledge. And yet,
>> for Blacksburg, we had numerous people applying from out of the country,
>> with requests like, "I'm coming to teach about X," or "I'm coming to
>> learn about how to run a FUDCon," "I'm coming to engage with other
>> people from the teams I work on," etc., without any very specific,
>> concrete deliverables.  I think these requests (and grants) need to be
>> cut down drastically, or we should reconsider the idea of just having
>> one or two large fudcons a year, bring in as many people as we can, and
>> push people to enable smaller one-day events for outreach in their regions.
>
> I'll give FUDCon Panama as another example here. From what I recall we
> held 3 subsidy meetings and we didn't deny a single request. All
> requests were approved until we reached the budget limit for travel
> subsidies. The only tickets not approved were those ones with missing
> information. IMHO this is not alright. In those meetings some people
> fell bad to deny requests or to give argumentation why one should not
> go. This happens for a number of reasons that vary from the vision of
> the event focus to personal identification with someone and even fear to
> pick up a fight.

Hi Igor,

I really understand this too. Making these particular decisions in the
community is very awkward and can easily result in hurt feelings and
contributors questioning the fairness of the process which is
especially hard on those involved who are trying their best to be
fair.

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.

I'm not sure that is something we could easily do but maybe it will
give someone else a seed for a better idea.

John