Funding Approval Meeting for FUDCon Kuala Lumpur 2012

[inode0]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Buddhike Kurera
<bckurera at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Hello
>
> IMO, this depends on the way the requests are evaluated.
> Last time at FUDCon Pune, the requests were evaluated on first come
> first served basis.
> If the same will apply on the FUDCon KL, then there is no harm taking
> requests before the
> deadline.

This practice has been very widely criticized as unfair and I hope you
evaluate all the requests based on the criteria here

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sponsoring_event_attendees

which says nothing about extra points for being eager to request a
subsidy. Some people try to arrange alternate funding or self-funding
but can't and so reluctantly request a subsidy from Fedora near the
deadline and they should not be disadvantaged for doing that (if
anything they should be rewarded for doing that).

Regardless of when a request is made though, it should be evaluated as
described in the link above.

Have you given thought to who will be the group of contributors who
will make these decisions? Will it include people who have pending
requests in the queue? Will it include anyone who notices the
announcement and shows up to the meeting tomorrow?

> IMO, deadline was set to make sure that no subsidy request will be
> made/ entertained after the deadline.

No, the point of a deadline is that your request will be considered if
it is made by the deadline. Requests can't be fairly considered if you
award 50% (or any other amount) of the funding at some arbitrary point
before the deadline based on only a fraction of the total requests.

> But there is no note on the evaluation of requests or how it is
> carried out. As inode0
> noted may be announcement of the subsidy meeting before one day may create some
> problems with the reporters to prepare. (As far as I can remember,
> this was discussed at the last
> planning meeting, so I think there is a slight awareness about this
> before hand,) Other than that I
> see no harm evaluating requests before the deadline. Major thing is it
> saves some $$$.
>
> Thanks inode0 for noting this, the organizing team will take required
> action on this.

Prices do fluctuate and there isn't any guarantee doing it now will
save money (although I agree it likely will but at a cost). But you
could have made that argument last week or the week before as well.
Why do four more days make such a difference now all of a sudden? The
harm is following a process where the rules keep changing in ways that
can easily seem unfair and biased to the community. It is more
important than $$$ to me that the entire APAC community is confident
that this process is fair to everyone.

I won't keep harping on this since I guess the decision has been made
at this point to start awarding subsidies before the submission
deadline. I'll just be content being on the record as strongly
opposing doing that.

John