Sponsoring event attendees

[Robyn Bergeron]

On 02/18/2012 01:58 PM, inode0 wrote:
> 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.
So, a few thoughts:

* We already have request deadlines - or we have at least attempted to 
in the past. Perhaps we just need to be more firm.
* I think the ranking thing is reasonably decent - though I believe we 
run the risk of potentially offending people by labelling them, or their 
contributions, as more or less important than another contributor.
* We often let things revolve around "the limit" - I think we should put 
in far more effort into knowing what that limit is before we start 
granting subsidies, rather than having it be a moving target, as that 
makes it rather difficult to prioritize.

It does seem to me, though, that every FUDCon has its own circumstances, 
not to mention priorities and goals in itself,  and I have the gut 
feeling that there is not really a one-size-fits-all solution.  Perhaps 
loose guidelines - as those you mentioned above - and even calling them 
recommendations - is really the best, and having the event owner(s) lay 
out on a wiki page the information about how and why things will be 
prioritized PRIOR TO THE SUBSIDY MEETING might be reasonable, rather 
than taking a heavy-handed, all-will-abide approach.

-robyn
> John
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