Hi On 14/06/2018 20:16, Chris Lamb wrote: >> * Increase the budget for bursaries from 60,000 USD to 70,000 USD > > I understand that a number of people have had their bursary request > denied already. How will raising the budget figure into that? In > addition, how much will this help accomodate more people?
I'll add some context as a newbie on the bursaries team who was part of the discussion about this in today's meeting. Nicolas reported that as it stands, about 50 people have been granted travel bursaries with an overcommit of around USD5k 16:51 < olasd> #info We've been able to grant travel to around 50 people (40 contributors + 10 outreach) for now, with an overcommit of around 5k USD I believe the overcommit takes account into people who will not be able to attend anymore. He also reports that this includes bursary seekers who reached a score of about 3.05 out of 5: 16:53 < olasd> fyi, our cutoff score is 3.05/5 which is fairly high compared to last year Bursary applicants are rated a score based on a bunch of different criterea. 3 is already quite high, with most DD's I've seen in the system getting about 2.5-3.5 (score of 4 is for priority funding for people who will add significantly to DebConf or do a high-profile talk, and 5 is "must fund", for cases where it will seriously hurt DebConf if they don't attend). It's a fuzzy score and humans ultimately generate it, and even though decimal points are allowed everywhere many good contributors probably ended up with a score of 3.0, so I asked olasd what it would cost to cover that last 0.05 points of people. He said about $10k. 16:54 < highvoltage> olasd: is there an easy way to see how much money is needed to get to 3.0? 16:54 < olasd> highvoltage: yes, I can tell you : we need 10k USD So, from a pure economics of scale perspective, I think it's beneficial for the Debian project to spend a bit more and have a few more high quality people over, especially since Debian is already spending so much time and effort on DebConf itself, so I gently urged Yao Wei to take it into account when revising the budget. Yes, a lot of people have had their travel declined already. I'm not sure what their cut-off was but these would be people with a low-enough score that we can confidently say it's going to be a "no". It also seems inlikely that someone with a score below 0.99 will ever get travel sponsorship, so I also think we can really notify them earlier, but that's a process issue we can discuss for next year. I hope that helps provide some background, happy to expand on anything and Nicolas, please correct me if I messed up anywhere. -Jonathan -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.
