 start so welcome to travel sponsorship to sponsoring both and I can just let Scoutens do the next okay so for the late-comers it would also for you be nice if you could sit here so we can talk together and not hide behind the others it's I was originally the one proposing this buff then Tiago, Gatemo, Jacomo and David joined me and the list is ordered by the alphabetic order of the first names if you wonder and we tried to prepare this buff two days ago I think it was and we had already had a discussion of two hours so that will be a bit constrained so if then you decided oh I'm gonna but a bit to manage David is going to take some notes on Gobi you can all if you want connect to the Gobi.debian.org server there's under buffs it has a document travel sponsorship and I'm going to do a short introduction but then I think it should be open discussion we define some topics we would like to discuss and yeah so the goals for this section we thought that we have to narrow this a bit down because it's that much that's a broad topic and our goals are to have better defined criteria for the next Debcon so we can try out this process and for next Debcon and possibly better or order or different questions matching these criteria and the third goal is it's nice to talk here we had these talks twice I think in the past and something's changed too also but something's going out okay so at the end of this session we would also like to form a team that carries on with this we have some non girls this session should not be about the actual money handling not about what was discussed on the mailing list already there it's not set what was discussed there but I think that's somewhat a different topic so we would like to keep this out of this session and also accommodation and food sponsoring if possible should be kept out so how it works today for those that don't know or have never been involved with it it's this year's process in it works similar in previous year but not exactly the same the applicants they have to fill in a form in Penta they give us their total travel costs the next question is labeled amount I'm unable to find myself none yet that's the wording we have now in Penta now it's just about what we have now to see and there's enough time for discussion afterwards and there's a free one free text rational that's labeled what are you doing for Debian why do you request sponsorship so we have these three things then the team rates all the applicants on two dimensions one is the contributor level the other is called requested amount for the writers and it's on a scale from minus minus that these are two minus that were combined by latte to plus plus so it and it's there's a zero level in the middle so it's five on five levels and we then combine these two ratings into one and with a weight for the contributor level with of 0.6 and for the requested amount ranking on of 0.4 then they were sorted according this score and granted sponsoring just for going down the list until we reach 80 the batch at 80,000 K dollars 80,000 dollars of amounts they were unable to find of this question yeah some statistics as I said 80,000 dollars was the budget this year last year it was 33,000 euros we had this year 42 applicants we don't know for last year and we granted 18 requests of those 18 for one it was too late so he cancelled and in 2011 53 requests were granted we don't know if there were more applicants than these 53 at all or if everyone got it and the team thought that we would have liked to grant nine additional requests if there would have been more money and the rest of the applicants were below zero on our score so we thought it we don't would not like to grant these requests even if we had more money this year you also only granted sponsorship if you could found the full amount right there was no partial sponsorship yeah there was some discussion among the team if we should do partial sponsorship of the requested amount and the majority of the team decided to not do that on the basis that if it reads amount I'm unable to find 80% of it is worthless because then they don't come so the first discussion topic is and I think that will probably be the the one that takes most of the time also is that what should be the criteria the basis for granting these travel sponsorship request now we have these two dimensions its need and its contribution level yes yeah I have a question from my RC it was the money for the one cancellation subsequently allocated to anyone else and now and it was not because at some time the whole Dampcon team decided to not do this because it's too late I think the confirmation of a sponsorship was sent like three weeks before the Dampcon so yeah because money was available too late Tiago so then just to give you an overview what we plan the next topic would be about the information we then need what should we ask a few ideas then one about should these requests and what was granted to be made public and how to proceed just a short summary of the criteria I think that yeah as I said they're widely worrying of opinions and I think the worrying opinions are mostly grouped around this question should it be and if yes how based on the actual need of the person requesting it or not it ranges from oh if you should only request it if I can't buy food anymore if I don't get it too if my employer does not pay it then you should just request it and if possible also get it the money and another question we could ask do we need agreed upon criteria at all or there are also opinions that say and if their opinion about this are distributed or varying inside the team then we get in the end somewhat the consensus of whatever criteria might be applied yeah maybe just a quick comment or not okay do you think we should stay on the slide no just a quick comment on that last point since it was originally a concern for me too but then I realized what we had essentially was eight or ten independent ratings of each person and as long as with each writer rated all people the same way then it's in some sense okay I have a I mean to actually answer the question about should these requests be public and it's generally not considered a good idea to publish for example the kind of thing that you would have to put on application like your income and so forth and in a lot of cultures there's stigma associated to you know needing financial help and in particular giving detailed information necessary and so at the very least I don't think that we could sensibly publish the amount of sponsorship that people have received maybe it will be worth just identifying who was thought sufficiently valuable contributor that they received some kind of sponsorship but the financial end of it is thanks but could you please stay on topic now and I think we will try to have the other topics later so the other topic of the criteria I think it will be I think it's more fair for everybody if there is a clearly defined criteria because also there is people that feel like maybe I'm cheating the project if I'm asking for sponsorship I feel guilty because I don't do enough etc. so I think it's it will be fair more fair if it's a clearly defined criteria yeah I kind of agreeing with that I don't think it's I don't I agree that we've got people making a judgment but there is a problem at the moment if people apply unevenly I mean myself I've never applied for a devil travel sponsorship because I think there are other people in WN who need money far more for that however if we decide that actually it's fine for everyone to apply then I don't really object fundamentally I just start applying to I think it's a bit silly at the moment if some people apply and get it just because they think it's okay to apply and other people are not I don't think I'm at all unique in that in not applying at the moment because we kind of assume it's the people who really need it in a more fundamental way speaking as the guy who's trying to take minutes I also would like it if we follow the topic so can we talk about criteria now is that your plan that's my plan but I think the last not that it's an important these are everything is important that people but I think one part of talking about criteria is also talking about if we really need criteria and I think that was your topic okay sorry if I understood it correctly just before we move on from that and forget about it entirely the where the no criteria thing comes from it was possibly an idea of mine last year which is that the it's not that you have no criteria you have a sort of smorgasbord of criteria that you suggest to the team and they can apply them as they feel fit to produce an ordered list and that if you then get people rising to the top of those ordered lists they will get funded for all the reasons that all the people in the team think are important and I think the problem with having a fixed criteria is that quite often you have people in the team applying criteria they don't really agree with and then sort of subtly gaming the way they give their points try and make the criteria they really agree with pop out of the system at the end and that's much worse yeah I think we were mixing up to kind of ideas about criteria here one is who we think should be applying at all and who we kind of advertise should be applying and one is how we actually make the judgment I'm not but in my point of a moment ago I wasn't trying to say how we should actually make the judgment in the end precisely but I think we should at the absolute minimum even if we didn't have a formulated metric for comparing people we should at the minimum have advertised who we are expecting to apply are we expecting everyone coming to be that to validly apply and get money if we happen to have it lying around or are this meant to be a bursary scheme for particularly people who particularly needed I think Christian wanted to say yeah yeah I'm not exactly sure I might be off topic because I had hard times following both Moray and Phil so sorry for that please slow down when you speak before my suggestion talking about criteria my first idea was sharing the way we writers actually rated up to now but I don't know if that's a good idea now in the session yeah we can do that that could be done yeah briefly preferably but that could give ideas to others my personal idea is we shouldn't have all the same criteria to kind of balance them together in some way should they it's hard for me to say they should be public or not because I'm having even hard time sometimes to be sure about my own criteria once you have done this you understand what I'm talking about I guess so that was a proposal I don't know maybe it's too long time for this session so my own criteria I was trying to avoid to make a kind of put quotes where needed a preference to the always the same people in some way I witnessed that we tend to do that with travel some sponsors sponsorship over time it's like three successive that can't find doing that and I tried to imagine the contribution of people and more of a picture of what they could bring to Debian so it was kind of the same idea joyous brought last last day come fighting for Debian newbies or things like that and I'm happy that this year we I think we have been able to do that in some way to bring new people in Debian and not sponsor quotes always the same people right I'm sure that those people some need that some are very very valuable contributors I ended up plus plus all the time those people I know are wide and respected and important or whatever Debian contributors so these were mostly my criteria and my criteria for rating travel was more trying to guess the price and whether it's reasonable or not for the person to request of that price of course somewhere more expensive than others and trying to forget that it's not really precise but this is the way I did actually I can continue I was going to you can too hello yeah I think there's more than one criteria there's more than one group of people who deserve sponsorship there different reasons and different level of the amount people cannot pay so I think this should be taken into consideration and also what Christian said this new initiative is also a good thing we should keep having like we had it last year and the year before and not this year which I'm very sad about yeah but there was the idea Christian proposed that every the dose that rated this year should explain a bit how they did it so we're drifting away with the topic I know it's going a bit back in time but well Jonathan Wilcher said that well just joining into this he would be very unhappy to have specific numbers specific amounts published he wouldn't mind a Jonathan was sponsored partially sponsored but not the specific numbers I he says I suspect the number of applications would drop to and therefore valuable contributors might not get a chance to be there I mean well we went already over it but to that topic I think it's completely clear that the granted sponsorship should be public that's when we are stabbing a need to document how we spend our money so we cannot say oh yeah we we hid it there under the carpet but even to a transparency I try to ensure that we have time for this topic but I really like to keep it on topic now things yeah so probably just one other opinion about how you did the writing no no I think for contribution level I just did a quick Google or Debbie and orc search and for the requested amount it was a bit fussy I don't know if I consistently myself applied the same criteria because I was constantly asking myself oh I didn't know really how to wait this but you definitely got a higher ranking by me if you paid a substantial amount yourself and and if I thought that the price or your travel cost seemed unreasonable I did a quick search on flight search engines to verify if it's or somewhat okay have we had everybody who did it this year now so I guess I was biased towards people doing sort of core infrastructure stuff in addition to packaging or so I I mean I do packaging but I wouldn't have ranked myself that highly for travel sponsorship I was biased toward people who are really sort of doing extra stuff and above and beyond whether that's reasonable or not that's what I did and for travel I found the two I was equally confused as go dance and but I really just looked at the requested amount compared to the geographic location so I didn't penalize people for being from far away but again I had some similar idea about I guess there was an underlying thought that well if we can pay for five people all else being equal if we can pay for five people rather than one we should probably pay for five the risk of I think it's within the agenda point so don't be me up there's not the we're talking here about criteria for comparing individuals which is obviously what you need to think about in the first instance but the point that's being raised here is also valid of how if you've got this comparison imagine you assign some perfectly accurate score to each individual there is still a question about how you actually decide who to give the money to in the end in most in I think every year all that's happened recently has been effectively has been people counted down from the highest ranking person to the lowest ranking which obviously avoids having to think about something more complicated but it's not necessarily the best way to spend WN money to do that if you imagine I mean you can easily imagine things like person one costs the same as person two to eleven together or as in the next person in the list and person M costs the same as the next ten would be and maybe it would be more useful to Debbie in overall to bring those ten people instead of one person from very far away obviously that gets into a lot of different issues you need to start thinking about a fairness over years and so on but I still think I do think it's wrong just to say well let's just carry on blindly and only count down the less than ignore this issue and there is also the bias that we enforce over the years is that if we only if we rank by contributed level then we risk that we only reduce the set over time and one good advantage of that con was the new best found last year for example is just bring new people to the thing but get benefit from that comes just because you are not yet a core member and I mean on one hand it's good to have core members here because it's also good work done etc but it's we have also to put some ways into having new contributors in I think right so if I can sort of propose a slightly more formal way of looking at this it seems that we have essentially kind of roughly three criteria for granting sponsorship the first is that the person is a worthwhile person to have a debcom for some reason or other and that's a thing that a lot of people have been talking about for example with newbies or core people or whatever and that's a thing that we need to talk about in more detail the second criterion is really nobody seems to be saying that everybody should be applying sponsorship there's obviously some criteria in a financial need yeah right I I would like to propose that there that the criterion should be that essentially the person would not be able to attend debcom otherwise because the point of the exercise is to enable people to come to debcom not to subsidize people in general and the third criterion is something a bit more willy but it's that the travel cost the actual claim is reasonable that the travel cost they're claiming are roughly sensible and and they're kind of fairly straightforward criteria I would like just to comment on one of your points I would not agree so much on this the people that can come otherwise should not apply I mean some people are able to get a lend money and get and make well commitment to get the money they don't have access to which is which can be hard for people to do who would come but a part of the sponsorship is making life less miserable for them so yeah I mean I think we I was just adding to the to the Gobi document that we we should add a quantitative field asking what would be your action if it was denied to you so I will go anyway too I would definitely not go yeah so just to let you understand what can happen I I will talk about my specific case so I asked for travel sponsorship I've been denied and as you can see I'm still here I what happened is that I asked my mother okay and it's going to affect me for the rest of the year it's not because I'm here then you should have it was the right thing not to sponsor me I believe like I care about DBN and it affects my life but I still want to come I don't know I think yours you and Gunnar are still not disagreeing but with the idea that there should be some kind of need criteria and though okay it's indeed I did want to suggest that they should be a particular specific criteria the question is as a kind of leave as I'm just wanting the a discussion that we had a past that called about this the need the need and the that wrote this top to this is that these are the same phrases that yeah was some proposal how to just agree with this approach it's sure I bet I guess is I mean I suppose can we ask is there anyone here who really thinks we should ignore needs and it should for example I mean to have a hypothetical example should it be should we be expecting that next time Mark Schollerworth comes to DevCon he would be perfectly validly applying for travel sponsorship if he's doing something at the time it's a big if not yeah so I think I the only reason I would propose and and have occasionally in private discussions propose not having a need criteria is that it seems very difficult to have a need criteria that we agree on and and to have one which is applied consistently and I think that a need criteria that is kind of fuzzy and badly applied is maybe worse than not having one I agree that the situation as it is now in my opinion is worse than just saying everyone that has to pay it out of their own pocket should apply just wanted because that's I think that was also year in your introduction that you said today some apply and some don't and I think that's not a fair situation so as I said before and we agreed on the same thing is it's quite important to have this criteria for the people to decide they should apply or not to make more fair the whole process and the other thing I was going to propose since there seems to be this recording theme of people who and are really big contributors and really well-known people and this is people who are newbies maybe a good way to solve this is to have two separate budgets so we had this money for newbies and we played with a different criteria that for the people who are big contributors I think we all agree on that I'm not so sure if I can have an opposite II I'm not so sure but because it's quite easy to get involved into the avian without being present so I it could also be an option to say people should be involved first because it's possible to do that without coming to any conference and if they show some interest then they basically are getting sponsored something about criteria that it's a typical problem in movie rating and that kind of things so we just need a lot of people ranking and the criteria then becomes unnecessary I mean if we are all of the confidence just ranking three or four people is the criteria becomes fair well I think everyone should write all the people to have consistent ranking well there's two things about that first movies you rank about some criteria still I mean is the actress beautiful or something and it's criterias that we know in advance the other thing I just wanted to just throw into the discussion I'm not yet convinced myself that it's a good idea but one obvious or objective measure that we could ask is what is your annual income and what is the part you're asking I mean that might be considered that it's just a measure that is somehow consistent across the countries of the effort I mean is it a month's worth of your income is it half a month is it a day or the three months and I mean that's that's a measure of the effort you have to make to come and I don't know I'm not sure it's yet good a good idea but I'm just throwing it into the discussion I think I think a bit to what Luciano said I think this this would not we cannot give everybody ranking rights but having a big enough committee as we have had ensures that the criteria is at least more a more distributed so I think having 10 people rank it should be enough in my opinion even if they have some diversity some divergence in their opinions and well I don't think that that the deer is so crazy I think that should come into account and not only for travel sponsorship but also for lodging and food I think it does make a difference and even more when when we are tight on money as we were this year I think it's a fair thing to ask right so I'm very strongly opposed to this notion that the that we'll just have you know 10 people and they'll each bring their own ideas to the table and somehow the result will be fair that it that is not a way to get fair outcomes we if you let people make decisions in an unstructured way and you don't give them formal guidance what you get is people's unexamined prejudices and even when you've got good people who are trying their best those kind of prejudices you know the structure doesn't provide you with the assistance to overcome your prejudices this is why we should have a system that requires the people making the decision to go through a set of criteria and think about them and make a decision in a structured way that's not to say that everybody has to agree it means that everybody has to think about the same questions and think about things in the same way okay I'm sorry I think we're running out of time for this topic if we want to discuss others and I think we can continue this in the bathroom or wherever if there's interest just to finish this I would like you to ask a few questions raise your hands those that think we should or only minimal criteria should be need and just everyone should be able to apply but just just on this neat thing who thinks that mostly everyone should apply and it should not be based on needs that much so we want to count and again it just made me think the thing is that if we have everyone apply then we have a larger set so it makes it harder for the rating team but it also makes it evenly distributed across the people that will come in the end but in that case we need more I think if people apply and there's some expecting that they at least could be granted if there's money so put up your hand if you think the travel sponsorship should be granted regardless of financial need in you have very valid points but you're also talking over the buff moderator which I find personally distressing okay yeah but can you raise your hand again so David cannot count okay it was a bad idea I think it's just I think my idea was that this buff should not be only about those talking a lot but also to gather a bit more quantitative opinions how people actually think I think there's more than one kind of need so the question okay my idea was to just have are you more leaning towards we should just grant those that actually very much needed and couldn't come otherwise or should we grant also those that have to pay it out of their own pocket it probably affects them somehow but they would come otherwise too I think so that's your opinion other might have other opinions so that's what that's what I want to find out I think maybe tricky to to to phrase this into a yes no question like just now because it seems that there is many shades in this there's many vectors to consider so probably this is kind of voting is a bit diverting from the real goal of trying is not that if one person more leans on the one side we just do it that way it's just to gather some view of the general what people think are you going to ask about these four criteria there or just about I was thinking just about the two but because I think these two questions are okay we can also say please because there's way than more there's not only give it to all or only give it to those in need because there's a different needs okay I have another idea it was just a spontaneous city of these four levels of needs where do you think we should draw the line I personally think it would make maybe sense to have different budgets to have one budget for newbies one budget for this criteria need and that for that criteria need that would split the money further but I think I don't know I'm not involved in travel sponsorship in any way but just something I was thinking about why I'm listening to what you're saying is at the university there you know they have scholarships and and there are two types of scholarships one of them is a married based scholarship where it doesn't matter you know if you if you're poor or not it just don't based on what you've done so in terms of Debbie and it will be your contribution and and the other one would be a needs based so if you're poor then you're more likely to get it so and and the third thing I heard here is is about the newbies so what I'm thinking is maybe there should be different slots you know so we have so much money we can sponsor X people and then out of those X people two of them are gonna be newbies three of them are gonna be needs based and three of them are gonna be that might be another idea one I mean I in general agree with this but one inconvenience we would have is that well we're heading towards a system where the number of cues approaches the number of applicants and and then people would a well the let's say the fight or the discussion would be to which queue are you sign are you to be assigned so yeah there are some criteria like newbies that's clearly easy to get but say if I want to get sponsorship should I wait in the line for the disadvantaged countries or for the people contributing to the end or to both what yeah and I would like to go to the public or not public topic because we just have five minutes left to on that I just say I think although I realize there are some privacy concerns about exactly what you make public I think it is a fair thing that if you are applying for money from Debbie and it should you should have to accept as part of that that at least at the very least your name is going to be made public because that also just avoid it takes away one level of problem by meaning that however whatever a stupid criteria we end up coming up with even if they're really bad at least then other people in the project can look at it and just make some opinion about whether they want to interfere or not if it's just a black box and they have no idea it's not really a good way to spend Debbie and money on my view I think other it's very important that it's clear to everyone if they apply what's gonna be public right what I think we can't do it for this year's but what I would like to suggest is that the application in turn the part of the application which relate to why should I be sponsored in terms of what am I going to do for Debbie and what is my justification for having Debbie's money that part that's not the financial side should be made public and the I think it would be fine to ask people for their income but that should be kept private and the result should be these are the applications that we accepted and you just you just get told this person was sponsored or not in the other way around could be useful for the applicant if the people says the output public the output of the comments the comment box I send an email like it two weeks ago asking for those boxes I mean I just anonymous ways to know what what sorry yeah I think it's on one hand it's probably tricky to completely anonymous this and it's also at least with the current system quite some work if you want to do this for everyone I think opening the I mean yes there should be something set back to the person as to why they were accepted or rejected but I think it would open to lots of disagreements if in your comments as somebody said something you don't 100% agree on then there will be flames so that can be problematic probably a good idea is that the team as a whole makes some statement for each person instead of trying to anonymize so I mean I'm not saying I'm not saying getting a consensus like yeah I do these five people and this is more or less actually there's not much to summarize at least currently because it's mostly a rating on this scale and very few comments yeah well James has a sense on on IRC that yeah a publishing names only he says is far enough publishing deviant sponsor this amount to those attendees X amount to Y attendees numeric is fine because the deviant needs to be transparent my name ask for this amount isn't other combinations become a gray area so yeah I mean finding which combination to publish is somewhat disagree I think it would be fine to say and this person requested that amount why not I think it's a source of flames also because then people have access to the result without having access to the discussion and I mean we have a discussion in smokey rooms for a reason because it's it involves a lot amount of private things and the result is also still be made from the private discussions we had so it it's actually quite typical that the results are known but the discussion is not in in many other contexts that I participate in so in scholarship deliberations in research grant deliberations the results are almost always public and so I of course can respect whatever consensus people within Debbie and want but personally I agree with guidance that I would also be willing to have the amount of sponsorship published if it was me and and then and I think that that information of amount although I agree it can be problematic I think it is somehow an important aspect of transparency too so maybe the privacy concerns are too much and we can't do it but I think it would be a good thing if we could yeah I'm not I wouldn't I wouldn't fight strongly on this point but I do I personally I do agree and I think if people if people the main people wouldn't people wouldn't in my personal view the main major reason people wouldn't want to publish is just they kind of feel embarrassed about having had this money but if that's the case then I just they should be applying in the first instance so okay I'm time so I'm sorry I propose the following those I would like to form a team to know of people who are willing to define the process for next year and also executed so I like very much this executing I like Phil's idea that it's not just the same people who make the decisions though what we meant to finish don't we but yeah I like Phil Hans's idea that it's not just the same core of people who actually do the voting so when you say do the execution I yeah I don't necessarily think that has to be the team that does the voting but I think they have also to follow up to actually implement the process they invented so that we don't just end up with a proposed process and then in next April something completely else is going to implement it yeah and if you're interested we could after the discussion meet in front and decide if we want another meeting to have ad debcon or by IRC or whatever how to proceed so but I thank you for the discussion can I finish on the very nice words I'd like to say that it would be really great if next year we had money for everyone that's it I agree thank you