Travel committee sync up
Overall, David is quite happy with the current workload. Of course, we are pre-GUADEC sponsoring time, so it's going to increase. The addition of comittee members will be welcome at this point.
The most consuming time is that the committee is a lot of incomplete (like bank details missing) or properly justified requests. He will work on getting better wording for the policy and request (/Tarvel/Request) process (especially for first timers). This isn't a problem generally when people were already sponsored for 2-3 times. Once done, he will welcome some help from the board on that.
Also, some improvement in the policy for ETA on delays of answers is going to be done. Most requests are treated within a week, but people don't know how long they should wait for. Adding something to the policy page like a minimal expectation time for a respond will help people. Then, incitating people to contact back if they didn't hear anything within that timeline.
Following are the subjects (with introduction from Nuritzi) and discussions/actions with David. Actions are written as such, please raise your voices on them.
Strategic invitation
It would be great to invite strategic speakers or participants to GNOME-related events. In-person events are where people can form relationships that carry on into the online realm and inviting some people to a conference to try to get them to become more active participants could be helpful. Maybe this is just having something like a hackfest at a conference and inviting some people to come to it who are't Foundation members. Right now the travel policy is pretty conservative and really discourages people who aren't Foundation members from applying for sponsorship. This category of travel also might be useful if someone wants to attend a conference on behalf of GNOME. I think this is already allowed under the current travel policy, but we might want to make it more explicit.
David's feedback: it's indeed not in the current policy for non fundation members. It's going to be a little bit extra work (due to increased amount), but no objection from David. Policy change is doable. If the board wants it, David is happy to get the policy changed and get to the extra work, and like, try it for a year and evaluate.
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Discuss who is in charge of identifying and inviting people -
How this is acked and communicated to the travel comittee.
Prepaid travel.
Some community members can't afford to book travel and get reimbursed afterward, and they may not even be Foundation members, but could be amazing contributors in the making. I know this is a bit risky, and we don't want to make it common practice to request cash advances, but it would be great to provide a special financial aid package where people can apply to have a cash advance if they really need it -- and to be considered even if they're not Foundation members (e.g. if they fall into the "strategic invitations" category mentioned above).
David's feedback: We are currently within budget, even if it has increased a little bit, but acceptable loss could be OK. This will require rewrite a little bit policy, maybe make it a little bit less explicit about things we don't want. In term of additional paperwork, it should be doable, as long as the board is happy with it. Once this is officially acked, he is happy to work on a process (with us) on this.
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Formal vote to allow prepaid travel, in which capacity?
Global exchange.
Right now, the main conference for core GNOME contributors seems to be GUADEC. It would be great to either fly more people from around the world to GUADEC, or fly some more core contributors to conferences like GNOME Asia, to help encourage growth in core development in those geographic areas.
David's feedback: It's a question of cost mostly: cost of cross continent flights is quite high, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable with the current budget. We can do the announcement a little bit more in advance maybe to encourage people travelling from further away to conferences.
Prices going up while waiting.
I think this is probably the most urgent and someone else may have already brought it up, but prices usually go up between the time that applicants apply and the time the travel committee processes requests. This means that some people might not make the conference at all because of the rising cost of travel closer to the date. I think that there are a few specific things in the travel policy to reassess in this regard: the item in bold on the travel request policy, "DO NOT BUY ANYTHING UNTIL YOU RECEIVE A VERY CLEAR CONFIRMATION," and the lines: "It is your responsibility to always choose the most economical option whenever possible. The GNOME Foundation spends a large portion of its budget on sponsoring travel for its members and still has to turn down applicants. The Travel Committee will look for more economical options and use it as a reference when deciding on a sponsorship."
David's feedback: Linked to previous one, the committee tries to always reduce total cost price. The number of hops can be increased to save some money and this is the research the travel committee does for expensive applications. However, agreed that the phrasing is a little bit too direct. David is going to rephrase those. Hackfest announce and sponsorship should be done way earlier (2 months) to reduce cost and this cost increase effect (the high increase is mostly in the last month)
Changing requests.
I've heard of people requesting money to pay for accommodation because they are going to split costs with someone else but need some money towards it, and instead receiving a pre-booked room. Can you ask for a clarification of the reimbursement policy -- is it ok for people to request the money and not the room itself?
David's feedback: Not aware of such case. Most of the time, one person paying the whole receipt, they just claim telling they share the room with another person. Rephrasing the policy around the line "if you are sharing a room and paid your part of it, you will get reimbursed from that part" will be done by David.
Exchange fluctuation:
Post-meeting note from Alexander (things forwarded after the first contact):
One thing we agreed on during the hackfest and that I didn’t pass on to you before your call was that sponsored people shouldn’t be the ones taking a hit in case of currency fluctuation, so the committee should approve amounts in the currency that is requested by them. I.e. if I ask for 200€ in my request, the approved amount (and the reimbursed amount) should be 200€ and not something converted back and forth to US dollars. Can you make sure the TC applies this?