Maemo Summit 2009/Sponsored travel
We need a procedure for people to request travel sponsorship - as part of the registration process is easiest - and an idea of travel budget, and a procedure and selection criteria for requests. Who will have responsibility for approving requests? The council, or Nokia? How will reimbursements happen?
Checklist
- Procedure for attendees to ask for sponsorship
- What is the total travel budget?
- Who will authorise travel requests?
- When and how will reimbursements be handled?
- What criteria will be used to decide who gets travel authorised?
Ideas from Quim in that Talk thread:
- 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 decisions and more manual handling of expenses after that, to have some flexibility closer to October?
Ideas from Jaffa:
- Selecting which "general" community members go could be something like:
- Top n karma holders
- Top m tmo posters
- Top o tmo thanks count (or ratio?)
- One slot for a "caption" competition winner on tmo: "I'd like to go to the Maemo Summit because...". Judged by the council.
- Also, what about some members of the upstream communities? Sponsorship seems like a good way of saying "thank you" and potentially getting them more involved in Maemo as a developer; rather than just an upstream provider.