On Monday, May 31, 2010, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote: > On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 02:06:28PM -0400, Richard Darst wrote: > > - Edit the current reconfirmation email to sai > > > > - We can't promise you sponsorship yet > > - Please fill in travel -> debian work so that we can review stuff > > - Reconfirm if you can, please fill in all your data anyway. > > - You'll get another email before you have to reconfirm, saying if > > > > you have sponsorship or not. > > As I said on IRC today, I highly object to this. In terms of food and > lodging sponsorship, we're only about $30-40k in the hole
to put things in perspective, 30-40k is 50-66% of what we have currently fundraised. > (yes this > includes about $20k from Debian), aside from the 70k we already got from the past DebConf. That speaks of a DebConf that is spending itself outside of reasonable bounds. > with another $10-30k of potential > sponsorship leads currently or soon being pursued and many more available. > Including travel sponsorship, we're $50-60k in the hole, and including an > optional small surplus, $55k-65k in the hole. In past years, with > sufficient strenuous effort, we have been able to close or reduce many > fundraising gaps, such that I think we can end up either with a surplus or > a harmlessly small deficit. asking 20k from Debian is by no means a harmlessly small deficit. You might say it is in line with previous deficits or that it is even reasonable but I can't call it harmless. The project can do plenty of things with that money. > If we inject this much proposed uncertainty into the process at least > regarding the expensive (accommodation) sponsorship component, on the > unreasonably pessimistic assumption we will fail to make the numbers > balance, then many people from poorer financial backgrounds will cancel > their attendance, and won't be able to change their minds a second time if > money materializes. This is highly unfair given that we promised to try > our best to provide them with food and accommodation sponsorship and still > have a good shot at doing so. I wholeheartedly agree with the above paragraph. But that still doesn't address at least 10-20 people I have peeked on the registration emails which are not involved in the project and are clearly taking advantage of our sponsored accommodations for a week of tourism in NYC (I like to call them $tourists, for obvious reasons). I respect you very much and I have been thinking for weeks why it is that you oppose us so strongly to clean up the attendee list from these $tourists. I'd love to hear it directly from you but so far you only say you oppose doing that. My guesses are so far two-fold: * Debian benefits from less people being in a position of power with respect to the rest. Letting people decide who comes and who doesn't is poisonous to the project in that regard. * The cost to the project of $tourist is just (some) money but the cost of missing new blood is huge, so better err on the side of losing money rather than mind-share. Now, my reasons to filter $tourist are the following: * It is the responsible thing to do for our sponsors. They give us money to make Debian great not to indulge friends and acquaintances of "real" attendees that got word about our generosity and decided to abuse it. * If we don't have enough money we will have to scale down things we know make the conference more productive. Proven events like communal diners. Again, undermining the conference and the value to the sponsors. * Some level of random attendees is fine, but this DebConf is unusual in two aspects: the location is very appealing and the cost to DebConf of the accommodations are relatively high (with respect to previous conferences, but very cheap to NYC). To put things in perspective, one low bracket bronze sponsor covers food and accommodation for only 3 attendees (4 tops). Removing 20 $tourist is equivalent to fundraising 5-7 new bronze sponsors (we currently have about 5 including ones that are "almost there"). * Removing a few $tourist is *easy*. I know Ana went through the list in no time and assemble some names. And we don't even need to boot them, just asked to fill in details in the same vein as travel sponsorship and send them to h...@. [bold]We already have a process in place for this.[/bold] We might not remove all of them but they are unreasonably represented in this DebConf. We can try to scale them to historical levels. > My proposal is that today or tomorrow we email everyone their > reconfirmation emails, saying that (for those who requested it timely) we > can confirm that they will receive accommodation sponsorship if they > reconfirm by june 10th and show up to the conference, and that we hope to > be able to confirm food sponsorship soon but need to delay that pending > additional fundraising. I share your optimism that DebConf10 will be great, things will turn out fine and fundraising will solve itself one way or another. The above proposal seems reasonable as it is in line with our current state of affairs. We can cover the $tourist and we can send the reconfirmation e-mail right away. In the worse case scenario we'll provide not food at all. However, I oppose not cleaning our attendee list on a matter of principle and as a DebConf Team member doing fundraising I find not doing so very demoralizing. So please explain why you want our sponsors to pay for a person who doesn't even care to give us his/her full name and expect us to pay for a full week of food and lodging in NYC (yes, we have those, no, it is not only one case and no, that person has only 37 pages with his/her alias and the keyword "Debian" out of 150,000 for his/her alias in Google). > On IRC, Joerg Jaspert, Safir Secerovic, and Steve McIntyre all seemed to > share my belief that we could raise sufficient funds over the upcoming two > months with sufficient effort and that my proposal was reasonable. I find that very reassuring as you guys are very experienced in that respect. Just to add some numbers to my concerns: debconf-team$ grep -c '^:' dc9/sponsors-table 30 debconf-team$ grep -c '^:' dc10/sponsors-table 70 (the sponsors-table lists each potential sponspor starting with ':') we have contacted more than double the number of potential leads than last year. We're not particularly successful, but we have been trying very hard ;-) > At > least some of them also thought the proposed reductions in sponsorship > guarantees were an overreaction. Point taken. Overreaction aside, the $tourists are an issue that deserves a solution even if we were swimming on cash. Being responsible with the money is key for recurring fundraising as in the case of DebConf. > On the other side of the issue, Ana > Guerrero, Richard Darst, Pablo Duboue, and Clint Adams were asserting that > I was engaging in magical thinking and unreasonably faithful in things I do think you are engaging in magical thinking and I'm looking forward to you using some of that magic to get the money rolling in :-) :-) > working out, and were highly concerned about what would happen in a > worst-csae scenario. Moray Allan was in between the two groups in terms of > fundraising confidence and emphasized that it was important to have enough > people focused on that task instead of split between different duties. Yes, in my personal case I should not have gone to help talks@ but I think I'll bail out now that they recruited enough people. > Apologies if I summarised anyone's view incorrectly. > > What does everyone else think? Please respond soon; I would like an email > to go out before end of evening tomorrow (June 1st) NYC time, and am happy > to put in effort toward that goal myself. Yeah people, speak up or you'll be sharing kitchen and bathrooms with a bunch of late nite partying binge drinking loud $tourists which such loose morals that they even steal money from Free Software projects ;-) P.
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