> People are denied travel sponsorship every year. This year, it > included a very active Debian community member, Clint Adams. I am > further disappointed in this decision as Clint was key to DebConf10. > I don't think Clint should be left out like this. The argument from > the travel sponsorship team will be "excluded on a technicality", but > I (and others) do not care: If the team can not manage to give money > to the most deserving people, regardless of technicalities, I think > the team isn't doing its job.
Most of the stuff already got answered in the thread, so I won't go over all points. The argument is "excluded because he got rated with such a low score that he ended up below the cutoff rate". That this happened is, to a big part, caused by him giving a very terse reason why he should be sponsored and what he is doing in Debian. Saying "the team isn't doing its job" is just wrong. The team did exactly the job it was put up to do. You might not like the outcome for whatever reason, but naming the team an incompetent lot is just wrong. > So my question: Will DebConf authorize this transaction? There will > be no extra expense to DebConf, this is money donated for a specific > purpose, not much different than getting a sponsor to fund a day trip > or something like that. While we are all happy with ANY external help with travel costs and even encourage people to find such, this possibly getting SPI in trouble doesn't sound good. Route it directly to him is better. > The fact that I am even writing this email indicates serious breakdown > in the system. These breakdown have been complained about for years. > As a positive solution to this problem, Phil Hands and I are hoping to > revamp the travel sponsorship team next year, based on the desires > expressed by the DebConf community at the BOF we have proposed, and > being as transparent and communicative about our team as possible. At > the very least, if we do not change the process, we can be more > transparent. We can't take over a team ourselves, but we hope our > proposal, whatever it is, is well received. I will be so happy to see something. This years team and process (done like past ones) came up when there was noone else doing it. If we have something nice and shiny next year already prepared, all the better. But I really doubt you will stop the complaints. There will always be people rated down. No matter their name or contribution. And you will always have people who think that bad. But DebConf just never has the money to fund all the travel. [ The following is a reply to Micahs mail in Message-ID: <8762mwem8r....@algae.riseup.net> ] > Is it not true that it would be considered, at minimum, a conflict of > interest if board members of a 501c3 organization were found funneling > money to themselves? I would think that it would raise significant > questions with an auditor who might be looking at an organization's > taxes. > If that is true, then it seems to me a clear conflict of interest that > board members who requested funding not only got perfect scores, but > also rated themselves with perfect scores. Wouldn't it appear, from the > outside, like board members are essentially giving themselves money when > they ranked themselves perfectly? Or when a husband ranked a wife with a > perfect score or vice versa? > I believe any of those would be considered either as either vested > interest, nepotism, malfeasance, or at minimum a strong reason for > excusing oneself for conflict of interest out of concern over causing > tax problems for the organization. > If we want to keep debconf and debian out of tax trouble, a committee > designed to execute a process that allocates money between themselves > isn't how its done. > Calling this a simple mistake is ignoring a very serious concern. Besides the numbers that Jimmy already provided: No board member was or is able to funnel money at themselve without the approval of another 10 people. Yes, this is a problem we did discuss before this (and in the past years). We can either forbid anyone on the team that has any other position in SPI, DebConf, Debian, ... as that can be seen as upping themselve. But that means losing many people who are willing to do such work (and that are NOT many). Or, the way we have chosen, we make the team so large that one single member (or even two combined) can not solely move money to themselve. (Thats just one reason for the size of it, but a good one.) And then we had, in the past, the rule to not rate yourself. Which in the end turned out to punish people for doing the work (no rate, lower score, WAY down in the sponsorship, and that just because you wanted to help DebConf). Which changed the policy to "Rate yourself. The rest of the team WILL rate you down if your request is insane". Which did happen, this year too. Yes, this is not perfect. Short of blocking out many people from helping out or of allowing every attendee to rank every other in travel money, I currently fail to see how to do it better. But as I already wrote, I will be very happy to see a proposal or maybe a working new process come out of the BoF. Im the first to be happy not to have to do all the work just to then get complaints to no end because someone who failed a basic input didn't get money... -- bye, Joerg The sooner kids talk, the sooner they talk back. I hope you never say a word. _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
