Hi Koen, On Tue, 2010-03-30 at 11:22 +0200, Koen Martens wrote: > Hi travel committee (cc guadec list), > > My name is Koen Martens, I'm one of the organisers of GUADEC 2010 in The > Netherlands this year. > > As such, I thought i'd be a good idea to seek contact with the travel > committee. As I understand it, you will be handling travel grants for > GUADEC 2010, and GUADEC 2010 will be putting an amount of money into > the travel committee funds. It works a bit different. The board authorizes a budget to be used frugally by the Travel Committee. The Travel Committee assigns the budget as better as possible. Once the event ends, the sponsored people must send their receipts (to the Travel Committee) to receive the reimbursement coming from the GNOME Foundation. The Travel Committee is only a proxy that put everything in order. > We have an amount set aside for this in the budget. Now what I'm curious > about is how much you would think you'd need (based on past experience > with GUADEC travel requests). The last GUADEC we had 54 requests, which was divided as: - Travel : US$ 46,989.38 - Lodging: US$ 22,508.00 We could not sponsor all of them. Some of people who was sponsored took a step back one week before the event, did not show up or did not requested the reimbursement. So, the budget earmarked was not used completely. FWIW, not everybody requested both travel and lodging. And providing lodging was a lot easier that the travel expenses. On the other hand, the Travel Committee took care of the booking, because it was easier and cheaper to handle than assigning the money to anyone. Also, for people is one thing less to be worried. > I'm also curious if you already received some applications, and if so how > you dealt with them. Also of interest is how you will handle requests. Will > they pile up and then at some point be evaluated, or do you evaluate the > requests on an individual basis? The process is explained at http://live.gnome.org/Travel/ It works almost the same as a Call for Papers, but in this case with sponsorship requests. We announce the beginning of the process, set a deadline, evaluate the requests, negotiate, make a decision, inform to the people. Eventually, we make a second process. We use the input from several places, such as the Program Committee, for speakers, maintainers for contributions of people, Summer of Code admins, etc. However, we take in consideration several factors (not in order): - Speaker? - Category of the speaker: Plenary, Core, Normal, BOF, Lightning talk? - Gender? - Volunteer? - Origin (country)? - Google of Code Status: Mentor or Student? - GNOME Foundation member? - Regular contributor? - Was sponsored before? - If it was not GNOME Foundation member, did he or she become a member later? - Did he or she blogged (reported) about the event he or she was sponsored? - Did he or she increased his or her involvement in GNOME? Some extra comments: * Origin (country), this is because if we can not sponsor everybody, we need a clue about how many of the same country are we sponsoring with respect to the others. * We sponsor partially to Google Summer of Code students, they earn some money, so we prefer to share the risk with them. * We do our own estimation of costs. If we find a cheaper flight, that is the cost we use as reference. We may negotiate, i.e. if a flight means 18 hours of layover for a short trip. > Anything you need from us, the GUADEC team, to make your job possible?? We will start the process this week or the next one. We are closing some pending tasks with hackfests. However, we already have received applications for sponsorships for GUADEC. We do not need nothing in particular. Just to mention some desirables: - To know the assigned budget (but I already know it :-) However, we need to be sure if the global budget (presented in the BID) is in a good shape. Because we were very conservative on this, I am positive on this matter. - The program committee does not have any major delay. - Soon we will book the lodging. We will start with the general recommendations. However, any help on this may would be appreciated. We will look for: - 20 double rooms. (with option to increase or decrease them, may be some single or triple rooms, for special cases) - Private bathroom. - Cheap but good enough. - Internet access - Nice if it has a lobby or place where hackers may stay together. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/
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