Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

I'm fine with GSOC students, in fact I would love to hear the internals of the process from their point of view but to sponsor 10 of them would put a significant strain on the budget I would of thought.

Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

Short version: We have a pie, and we have to use the pie to ensure that as many important contributors as possible are there. There will be some cut & dried cases. There will be some cases where we are in a grey area. And there will be some definite "no"s. Metrics might help in the grey areas, but in the end it will come down to who you want there, X or Y?

I agree with Quim, no more than 2 to 3 people, but with transparency in the decision making process and results, is the best way to do it.

Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

I also think that asking people if they would be able to attend if we paid part of their expenses would be useful.

Dave.

Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

New plan, based on comments from people and the assumption that the maemo.org gang-of-four will expense Nokia directly rather than coming out of the sponsorship budget. Figures in brackets are expected number from that slot, and total so far:

1. Anyone speaking in a "proper" session (~30/30)
2. The current (at the time) community council (5/35)
3. 5 Mer slots for Stskeeps and anyone else he wants (5/40)
4. 10-20 slots for arbitrary decisions decided by the council: community bloggers, GSoC students, cool Fremantle developments, upstream community members (~15/55)
5. Top 5 current OS app authors (i.e. currently diablo; personally I hope it'll be fremantle by the time of the summit!) on downloads.maemo.org based on downloads & rankings (5/60)
6. Anyone in the top 25 of karma. (~15/75)
7. Top 5 people on tmo on thanks/posts ratio, where posts > 300 (~4/79)
8. Anyone in the top 50 of karma coming from outside of the EU (~15/94).
9. Any previous council members (~7/101).
10. Anyone speaking in two or more lightning sessions (~4/105).
11. Any remaining, based on karma.

So that allocation is looking at about twice as many potential sponsors than last year.

There's a lot of overlap in the groups, hence the lower figures for the expected number of people in each group. For example, someone like yerga might be giving a talk; has a lot of karma; has some highly downloaded apps; may stand in the next council elections and win. That wouldn't mean that we go to the next highest app author automatically.

Two questions:

1. Is the prioritisation roughly right? (ignoring whether it needs to be judgment based or just different numbers)
2. Should it pretty much all be merit based after the first item on that list? Or should things just be jiggled around/slots & expectations changed?

Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

> Anyone speaking in a "proper" session
(...)
> Anyone speaking in two or more lightning sessions

In reality, a speaker can or cannot afford to travel to Amsterdam, no matter whether is to talk 5 minutes one time, two times, half an hour or two hours.

I think someone doing a lightning talk should be able to request sponsorship and get it, either because is a good speaker with an interesting topic (this should be the criteria to approve any session anyway) or because accomplishes one of the other criteria (top 50 karma etc) or both.

In practice: the content committee needs to look carefully what lightning talks get approved, specially when they come from someone "unknown" in the community or difficult to evaluate based on e.g. other presentations elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong. I'm overall happy on the selection of lightning talks and corresponding sponsored participants last year. But now I think that it was too easy to submit a proposal, get the corresponding sponsorship, deliver the 5 minutes and enjoy the weekend in Berlin. Maybe someone is tempted to exploit this "weakness" this year.

Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

I think you're arguing that if someone has a half-hour talk accepted, but doesn't fulfill the other criteria; they'll only get sponsorship if they pass the entirely subjective test.

If so, I disagree. If someone's willing to give a presentation to a large audience to the benefit of the community (having passed some bar to get past the content committee triumverate) the least that they can be offered is sponsorship.

I don't disagree.

Don't disagree here, either. Hence the "2 lightning spots" requirement. Perhaps that should be higher. Or dropped altogether. Giving a lightning presentation doesn't require the preparedness of a full-blown talk (and neither should it, that's the point). Perhaps someone who's only giving lightning sessions should only get sponsorship under the other criteria (including the subjective one).

Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

Does anyone disagree with the premise of my prioritisation (whether it's a series of rules applied or the guidelines which subjective judges use as a starting point)?

Is there a concrete alternative proposal other than "some people should review them all and pick which ones they want"?

Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

You have identified the 'for sures' - people giving sunstantial presentations; the Maemo related people (Mer, GSoC, upstream contributors, etc); and then a pool of people whose sponsorship is dependant on their contributions to the community. Seems like a fair way to proceed to me. There can be some grey areas in the last pool - the community people. But that area will always be grey at best.

Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

Agree, the content committee will take this into account for sure.

Re: Sponsoring participants to the Maemo Summit
 

IMO your rules are pretty sane, but I also agree with the majority of Quim's thoughts, and also it will not be that hard to select ~80% of the sponsored participants. For the others a case by case evaluation following the proposed guidelines is needed.