On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 09:49 +0100, Holger Levsen wrote: > are there really supposed to be two letters for "visa support"?
In the past, the rough policy was: - People who we knew, who requested it, and who provided us with the information needed, got the 'sponsorship' letter. This was mostly useful for people from poor countries who we were providing food and accommodation sponsorship to -- the letter was personalised to state their full details and to say what we were providing. For DebConf7, we sent out physical copies of the letter wherever possible (i.e. except where people applied very close to the conference, long after our deadlines), as 'original' signed letters (not printouts/copies) were required by some visa officials. - Anyone who wanted it (unless *obviously* just spamming lots of conferences they'd never heard of) could get the invitation letter. This could be useful for some visa/immigration purposes (especially if you don't need or already have a visa, but just want something you can show suspicious border officials), and in cases where we're not providing accommodation/food sponsorship, there's probably no benefit to the hassle of getting the person's full details for the first letter (which frequently took multiple emails to the requestor). Of course, the second letter may *also* be useful for non-visa purposes, e.g. to show to an employer. However, past experience shows that people are typically slightly confused about what they want / about the distinction between the types of letter above, so it makes sense to have one address dealing with both types of letter, and giving people advice as needed. > And second, which address should we use in the header of the letter, atm it > still has "debconf7 limited"..? I raised this issue in the last couple of meetings. It should probably be the legal entity that the conference funds are going through, which still isn't known for sure (that's why it's not updated yet). I also sent Rene a copy of the letters a week ago as he offered to translate them to Spanish, but I haven't heard back from him yet, maybe someone else has time to do that quickly? (But, to repeat myself, please *don't* send the visa letter to the mailing list, each year we already have Debian-unconnected people try to abuse our visa support.) -- Moray _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
