Pablo Duboue dijo [Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 12:49:03AM -0400]: > > (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.
Although this is completely true... > > 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. Well, but as of late years, since the project (led by the successive DPLs) took real hold of the financial situation, one of the main accepted Debian funds uses is to organize presential meetings. So, yes, US$20K is steep - but it is the accepted use for those funds. > 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 compeltely agree to clean from tourists. It is not so easy to do this, though. We have drastically reduced their percentages, but I doubt we have many in that case. Maybe we should hold another herb-ish meeting again to discuss them case by case? > * 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. This is a very important point to keep in mind. In previous years (and in this year, if I'm pressed to point fingers :) ) I have strongly pushed people to try to attend DebConf. Some of them have become active Debian contributors. Some have just enjoyed a good holiday - Not a holiday of touristing around (at least those I invited), but a good holiday of meeting new geeks and learning about Debian. Still, if I insisted on say 10 people to join us at DebConf and got three of them to become involved in the project... I believe it is still money well spent. > * 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. An important way to make Debian better is to get new blood, so this point against should not be taken too strongly. > * 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. Oh... I would have thought just (as I said) we were making progress on this account :-( > 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). That is a clear person to say "no, thanks, go away". Seriously. We can take some people we don't know about, but the minimum we can do is ask them who they are. Even -this is America!- you have the legal obligation to ask for full name and some basic data. After all, if I turn out to be a terrorist, you are responsible for my entry. And everybody knows that a mean, long-bearded, strange-named person is up to no good. [ BTW, I was granted my visa, yay! ] > 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 ;-) Yay for free-as-in-b33r! Greetings, my bed eagerly awaits me. -- Gunnar Wolf • gw...@gwolf.org • (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
