Hi Micah, I'm going to rearrange your email to respond better to the different points you're making.
On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 01:05:30PM +0200, micah anderson wrote: > When the rationale, for some reason, continues to be that Clint did not > answer the second question, [...] > dkg did not provide the second part of the question either, but for some > reason, Clint's failure to do that was important, while dkg's failure > was not. [...] > but I feel like talking about the first part of the question, when the > argument seems to be that Clint failed to provide the second part of a two > part question is beside the point and moving the argument. Before we compare > the relative merits of the first part of the question, resolving the > inconsistancy of the assertion about the second part of the question is > important, at least that is what has been asserted by everyone who has been > arguing that is the reason why Clint failed to receive funding. > > So... either the argument that he did not receive funding because he failed > to answer the second part of the question is wrong, or its not. I just read through all the mails I've sent in this thread to be sure of what I'm about to say before responding. I haven't ever asserted the rationale you say I have. I've said that he explained neither his contribution nor his financial need. I've said that I thought "all highly involved non-herb-team applicants other than Clint" made justifications for reasonable requests, which was ambiguous as to what I was referring to, but I was referring to the whole question of "why we should sponsor you" en bloc. (Most or all of them may have answered both parts - I honestly don't remember.) I've said that his answer was pretty much applicable to almost every conference attendee, and I wasn't just referring to money either. Given this clarification about what I was asserting, I think there's no inconsistency between how we evaluated Clint and how we evaluated dkg here. It's probable dkg ought to have been dinged to a similar amount as the aforementioned herb team member for not giving a financial need justification, but this error did not change the result compared to if we had dinged him. For my thoughts on Joerg, see the end of this mail. I realize the travel sponsorship BoF may decide it doesn't need to ask about financial need next year, which is Debian's decision, not mine personally. If we do continue asking it, though, the "Requested Amount" part of the rating should either be split or renamed to make it harder to accidentally be inconsistent about overlooking that. > I do not agree with your analysis of the first part of Clint's response > (which I have read) Since he has clearly shared his response with people outside the herb team who are referencing that to lend authority to their analysis in a public discussion criticizing the herb team's decisions here, with Clint also participating publicly in this discussion a bit, I think I'll go ahead despite my reluctance and will quote it in full: Question: "What are you doing for Debian? Why do you request sponsorship?" Answer: "DD" That was his whole response. There was no "first part of Clint's response". There was no second part. There was no second word. A large majority of attendees fall into this category. Many minimal-to-zero contributors (as of their 2011 activities) do. Even if the question was solely about "What are your Debian contributions?" this would seem not far away from an intentional non-answer. I can understand it being distasteful for various members of the project to self-promote, and I support the idea to gather some of the data automatically in the future, but this is kind of like applying for a stipend to cover airfare to a systems administration conference and answering a question "Why should we give the stipend to you?" by saying "Sysadmin." It's not a useful bit of information for a process that was supposed to make individualized evaluations. I know Clint gave a much longer response via email after the decisions had completely been made. Even a subset of that would probably have produced a drastically different result. Regarding Joerg's case: > I don't think its particularly germane or illustrative to compare Clint's > answer to the first question to dkg's. A more interesting comparison is to > compare Clint's response to Joerg's (just to pick one, not to pick on Joerg) > - because Joerg didn't fill it out *at all*. One of them was on the herb team > this year, and one was not. One received requested travel sponsorship and one > did not. Guess what? I agree with you. That was wrong and inconsistent and produced an improper result, though hopefully you'll believe me that it wasn't intentional favoritism. I am not going to excuse that, period. I have no idea what the other team members think, but I apologize for not factoring his omission into the ratings I gave him as I did with several others. By way of possible partial explanation, I will speculate that one influence was him having the lowest person_id and therefore being considered first before we looked at other responses and got into a habit of responding consistently. This goes back to us being fallible human beings like everyone else. As I see it, given the procedures and policies we were intending to (and mostly did in other cases) apply, the mistake here was not with Clint or dkg, but with Joerg. Again all three of these people have certainly contributed enough to Debian to be worth sponsoring up to their financial need if not more, but I agree it's entirely implausible that Joerg was unaware he should have provided some answer to the penta questions. Joerg, what are your thoughts on this as the person in question, and what would you suggest be done to fix it? In the interest of being fair to everyone else who we evaluated as we said we would, I'd suggest you give back your sponsorship to either SPI or (if Debian thinks this would be a better thing to do in terms of goodwill/corrective gestures) Clint. It's not my place to force this, so this is merely a suggestion. If you decide not to do this, since I was one member of the team that collectively and unanimously messed up our consistency in his case, I'll be willing to combine personal funds with any other herb team members who like this solution and either reimburse SPI for the full amount of Joerg's sponsorship or (depending on which Debian prefers) donate that amount to Clint's travel costs instead. This is a logical extension of my offer to forego my own sponsorship if Debian or DebConf generally decides that it was improper, and I'm willing to do this even if no other herb team member wants to join me. I hope this at least provides some evidence to support my good-faith efforts, even aside from complying with my duties as a director of SPI. Regardless, it's a reasonable objection and a worthwhile thing to correct. - Jimmy Kaplowitz ji...@debian.org _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
