Last year we had a budget to sponsor key people to the Maemo Summit (travel and accommodation) and this year we will do the same.

But can we do it in a better way? Last time I was the one and only benevolent dictator, the whole process was quite time consuming, many participants had to pay in advance with their credit cards and then get reimbursed many weeks after.

Some ideas:

- Clear criteria to be invited: speakers, core volunteers in the organization, what else?

- The decision of inviting community members is made by community members (who?)

- An external travel agency takes care of travel arrangements, as we did in the Danish Weekend.

- We book a number of rooms in the same place and we pay in a single go as group reservation (as done with the Tracker Hackfest last year and in the Danish Weekend too).

This system requires that the list of approved sponsored participants is known quite in advanced. It is also tied to the approval of sessions/speakers.

Perhaps we spend 50-80% of the budget this way and we look for more ad-hoc decisons and more manual handling of expenses after that, to have some flexibility closer to October?