-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Hi all,
We are assembling this year's Bursaries Team to help us rate the travel sponsorship and food/accommodation requests for DebConf14. We will follow most of the past years' procedures, always trying to improve on, specially on transparency. Are you interested in helping us? Read on! :-) What is this "Bursaries Team" all about? The Bursaries Team has a very important role in DebConf: they are responsible for evaluating requests for sponsorship, both food/accommodation and travel. Funds for sponsorship are limited, so this team has the difficult task of ranking sponsorship requests to ensure that these funds are put to the best use for Debian. Obviously, the problem is much harder than just assigning the money to the various _tasks_ we have to do, as this decision directly affects individuals. We have tried in the past to include in our team people from various areas of Debian, from different geographic origins, even with different group of friends, in order to avoid "clique-based" rating, or in any way biasing the results. Once again we are repeating the idea of broad call for help, using d-d-a to hopefully reach a bigger part of Debian, as it is Debian funds we will be using and it is Debian-related people (whether DDs, DMs or other contributors) we will be assigning it to. What do we need from those who volunteer? The deadline for requesting sponsorship is on Thursday 2014-05-15, and we are aiming at producing the results by Sunday 2014-04-25 to give sponsored attendees time to get good prices on plane tickets. We have a week where you'll need to concentrate your work/time so we can produce our results and delivery them on time. First, to be part of the Bursaries Team you can't request travel sponsorship for yourself, the goal here is to avoid influencing the decision process, and also to reduce legal risks for fiscal sponsors. Second, some time and patience. You will have to go through the amount of people requesting travel sponsorship (you can expect it to be between 50-150 people), look at their reasoning as to why they are requesting it, how reasonable their requested amount sounds (yes, "reasonable" is too broad a word -- the team will have to decide about it), and rate numerically. Usually, once the requests are rated, we define a cutoff value. Third, an extra bit of time and patience. We will try to coordinate asynchronously by email, but an IRC meeting might be necessary to make the final decisions, ensure the produced list looks sane, and to find any hiccups before they explode. And if they explode, believe me, it can be ugly. But they don't have to explode at all, as we are nice and careful ;-) Finally, to meet the requests for transparency, we have to report our work, without breaching the privacy of the people who request this sponsorship (again, as this is a very personal, social and money-related topic, it can be very touchy). So, the work will not finish as soon as we deliver the list, but somewhat later, quite probably a bit after DebConf itself. Again: You don't have to be a DebConf long-time organizer nor attendee. You don't have to be a many-years-long DD. We want the group to be diverse, and that *surely* includes people that simply are not in the same intra-Debian demographic group that most of us are. We are aiming to have a group of ~10 people to be large enough, but not too large. So, if you want to be a part of the team, please reply to debconf-team @ lists.debconf.org letting us know. As you might notice we are on a short schedule, so please, reply as soon as possible, before 2014-05-16 (Friday). Bonus question: why is it called "Bursaries Team"? In previous years this team was also known as "Travel Sponsorship Team", "Travel Bursaries Team" or simply "Herb", we are trying to reduce confusion, specially with the Sponsorship Team that handles the event sponsors, so in recent years it was renamed as Bursaries Team, removing the term 'sponsorship' from its name. And to give you some extra context, Wikipedia to the rescue: In modern English usage, however, the term has become synonymous with monetary awards made by some institutions to individuals or groups of people who cannot afford to pay full fees. According to the Good Schools Guide, a bursary is "usually for helping out the impoverished but deserving and those fallen on hard times". Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bursary Thank you! - -- Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (faw) <f...@debian.org> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJTcIuQAAoJEMa4WYSFUi4tvkYQALx38pT8kF9WSrbbXFnTPn4T 0v5ClQgBsus8o/TxrUfFgdYfDZsiivIlMyjjU/x5mFDTAaJh1flS6f98wSq/33cu A7QIXs/mDEpuagjzyQPGWmtPYlAt+9OSE1ltYlEKDnrLQ1wHCaEJFjAH7VoJFP3W i3fLMFuTb0Ulhu7mXc2drCkVfSP2lc9tn5CVWgdyqAXD3N7RJiDPTFnnLYZKhOGb TVPKB1P8ky+h0lmlVdSZHjXHq+05pB8JIYLGpy6Wo/E7HqhQL17/kZiKUQFPNx0v 9rzdpCmPAr2DdWNXMaWd3CsHGCmkkx8AY9wNn85ZtsjmCvRyt/6/u+5Br4kIL8Jg Ra1UTuDEi/dA0vmb9coVFr1XNlAF3oud2QtyGNyABxyuaO/2ugNZx4xdKjZ2a55D Jk8ILV8w5Jmu6jRGfNW32yoDLqx9Iu11hwbFf7nPUwaayaMbulNI+Jghsuug4/KH kwt+rIbpkDiJ0h21HqDhPIKCjFBtOPQj8FWE7E8ZrR9V1nsN7pTMlGi86Co1T1EB eJtXMXkeP2wei77pBMLfAkzpib1TpQcLZG1kylNyoZ4bQJ9fhlF3MaaYc6x9A8s+ ALXgxh/QEkUtpT2M4QlWGMoJYH33xKdfRi5Nn6O0PJBN7k0QjRaI35UFqK0qELoz xZxeeE32elgWTTLK8P5n =tgdJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
