Tag Archives: travelcommittee

Sponsorships for GUADEC 2014

The big kidWe had a grand total of 59 sponsorship applications for GUADEC (up 5 on 2013) and a budget of €30,000 (approximately $43,000). The requests amounted to $63,799 which we calculated would be more realistic at $61,899 after verifying travel and accommodation costs. We were able to offer sponsorships to the amount of $39295 to 58 applicants. We helped find an alternative source of sponsorship for the applicant who was not offered sponsorship.

The applicants consisted of 32 Foundation members, 11 speakers, 24 GSoC students, 2 OPW interns and 1 journalist.

The first application was received on the 12th of May (thank you for being organised) and seven applications were late (one of which was over a month late).

Some people who couldn’t make it to GUADEC did not tell us so beforehand. Unfortunately, the lack of communication has cost the Foundation a little bit of money as we did not have a chance to cancel the rooms which has been booked for those people. At a time when the sponsorship budget is very tight, this could have been handled with more consideration.

9 people sent in their receipts past the deadline.

A fair few people used the plain text application form when sending in their sponsorship requests, which I find easier to process than the LibreOffice form as I don’t need to open it in another application.

In somewhat related news, the Travel Committee is now verifying considerably more stringently that the sponsored attendees for all events fulfil their duties.

(André is always happy when the Foundation can help people come to GUADEC.)

Update to the GNOME travel sponsorship policy

waiting in schipholThe Travel Committee have traditionally had a policy that local travel was not reimbursed unless explicitly agreed beforehand. The policy was not explicitly mentioned anywhere, so I have updated the wiki to make it more clear: https://wiki.gnome.org/Travel#Travel.2BAC8-Policy.Travel_policy

This applies to large events which are handled by the Travel Committee and to small events which are handled by the Foundation board.

Post-GUADEC fun

Lightmatter paperworkGUADEC may be over, but there’s still plenty of follow-up work going on, like processing the reimbursements for sponsored attendees.

The Travel Committee has received only around 30% of receipts so far, but that has been enough to almsot give some of us a mental breakdown as it takes around 20-30 minutes to process each set of receipts if there are no problems.

For the sake of our sanity (and If you want your reimbursement to be processed quickly and painlessly) please make sure to send all of your email receipts as PDFs and all scans as JPEGs or PNGs. Forwarded emails, .docx and .doc files are problems which kill bunnies. Please don’t kill bunnies.

Sponsorships for GUADEC 2013

The big kidWe had a grand total of 54 sponsorship applications for GUADEC and a budget of €30,000 (approximately $39,000). The requests amounted to $57,668 which we calculated would be more realistic at $53,661 after verifying travel costs. We were able to offer sponsorships to the amount of $45,055 to all 54 applicants, as Google will kindly assist with some of the cost of bringing the interns to GUADEC.

The applicants consisted of 24 Foundation members, 12 speakers, 24 GSoC students, 5 OPW interns, 18 women and 1 journalist.

The first application was received on the 5th of April (thank you for being organised) and three applications were late.

This was the first event that I have helped process from the start, with lots of help from Germán. The earlier applications were generally easy to process, but some of the later applications were more time consuming as not all were complete and precise, so we needed to verify details. Sorting applications is surprisingly time consuming, three of the travel committee members spent around 51 hours on it over the last week, and there are many points to consider before making the offers. Overall, the applicants have been happy with the offers that they have received, some have already booked their travel, and it is satisfying to see so many Foundation members and new contributors being given the opportunity to come to GUADEC.

Gearing up for GUADEC

Old town hall in BrnoGUADEC is only a couple of months away, so it’s time to start planning for it. The main conference days will be on the 1st to 4th of August, while the BoFs will run from the 5th to the 8th of August.

For those of you who have not been to GUADEC before, the talks happen during the main days while BoFs are reserved for planning and hacking sessions.

The travel sponsorship application period will close in a few days, so now is the time to send in your applications and volunteer to help out during the conference!