Process & Approval for Collab Summit Travel Fund

[mikeal]

I know that we've already discussed this in the past but for audit purposes we need a more refined process for approving use of the travel fund so I'd like to talk about this prior to the board meeting next week.

A few people were added to the list for the August summit and it puts us over the budget we were trying to hold to before.

Process:

• TSC approves target budget (max amount to spend on travel) and caps on each type of spend (with the possibility that the TSC can approve a specific spend over if need be).
• Contributors in need of the fund apply (this will happen in the GitHub thread) but should explicitly state if they need flight, accommodation or both.
• If the number of contributors in need of the fund exceeds the target budget the TSC will prioritize the list of contributors applying for the fund.

My suggestion for the August Summit:

• 15K max budget (we had previously talked about 10K but I don't think that is enough)
• Approve a $900 max spend per person on accomodations.
• Approve a $500 max spend on domestic travel
• Approve a $1000 max spend on international travel (if someone has to go over it just requires additional TSC approval)
• @bnb and @snostorm seemed to be offering to put themselves towards the end of the list (although I may be miss-interpreting that). The working groups they are heavily involved in (website and evangelism) aren't expected to be the hottest topics of conversation during this summit so it might be best to wait for the next one and make more of an effort to bring more of those working groups in.
• Approve the following applicants now as they are expected to be low in cost compared to the rest:
  • @Fishrock123 (from British Columbia)
  • @nodebotanist (from Austin)
• Approve the following list if they can stay below the approved max spend, if their costs are going to be more than that we'll need to get TSC approval.
  • @yosuke-furukawa (from Japan)
  • @joaocgreis (from Portugal)
  • @Starefossen (from Norway)

[Fishrock123]

Contributors in need of the fund apply (this will happen in the GitHub thread) but should explicitly state if they need flight, accommodation or both.

In this thread? (Both.)

[mikeal]

@Fishrock123 the summit thread where we've already collected them for this one openjs-foundation/summit#1 I only called it out because we'll need to continue to do that for future events.

[Fishrock123]

Also, didn't @orangemocha potentially need assistance?

[mikeal]

@Fishrock123 I don't see that in thread but he did add @joaocgreis who needs travel assistance, maybe that is what you're thinking of?

[orangemocha]

I don't need assistance, thank you. @joaocgreis' ticket is well over $1000, but we managed to find him accommodation for free (staying at a friend's place). Perhaps the foundation can reimburse a higher portion of the ticket for him?

[mikeal]

@orangemocha that would fit provided the ticket is under $1900, if not please get us an estimate and we can bring it to the next TSC meeting.

[thefourtheye]

Is it too late to say I would love to attend (I became a collaborator last Friday only) and need travel assistance (I am from India)?

[mikeal]

@thefourtheye the upcoming one is only a few weeks away so the flight cost may be too high. We'll be doing another one soon enough though :)

[thefourtheye]

@mikeal Oh okay, Thanks :-) Looking forward to the next one. Also, do we have an agenda for this summit?

[joaocgreis]

@mikeal The ticket was $1,742.66. It would be great if the accommodation money can be used to reimburse the whole ticket!

[mikeal]

@joaocgreis shouldn't be an issue as the amounts are set with the expectation of being spent per person but we'll bring it to the TSC meeting tomorrow just to get a final stamp of approval :)

[yosuke-furukawa]

@mikeal Thank you for bringing the issue to TSC agenda. my travel ticket will be over $1900 :( . the week is in Japanese summer vacation, so my travel cost is crazy high 😨 ... It would be great if TSC approve the extra budget, But it is okay for me to not approved the extra budget, I can handle to go to the summit in planned assistance. I am looking forward to seeing io.js WG members on the summit :)

[rvagg]

15K max budget (we had previously talked about 10K but I don't think that is enough)

Agreed, although we may need to push higher because:

Approve a $900 max spend per person on accomodations.

SF is expensive and I'm going to guess that we may see additional requests for accom.

Approve a $1000 max spend on international travel

I suggest we bump this to $1500, $1000 doesn't get you very far from most countries outside of the Americas.

[mikeal]

SF is expensive and I'm going to guess that we may see additional requests for accom.

Last time I looked I saw several reasonable options under $300 a night but if those have booked out we can increase it.

[Starefossen]

It looks like my travel will be about $1400; just need confirmation that the $1000 travel fund is approved and I can probably cover the rest personally. It looks like there are plenty affordable airbnb accommodations in the SF area.

@mikeal What is the address of where the summit will take place?

[mikeal]

Summit will be at Mozilla's SF office https://wiki.mozilla.org/SF

[nodebotanist]

I have not booked my flights or hotel and unfortunately I have to bow out of the Summit-- day job takes precedence and they need me elsewhere :)

Perhaps the money that would be spent on me can be spent on someone else haha?

[snostorm]

Hi all! I haven't chimed in yet during the past few days, but I have been busy deliberating/strategizing since the details landed. My flights would be ~US$1300 but I'm happy to make up for the higher transcontinental flight costs by booking a $80-100/night AirBnB (or splitting rooms) to help stay within the general per-person limits.

I haven't booked, but I can very quickly to pull the trigger once I know the odds of being approved.

It is correct I put myself lower on the priority list. If there are TSC or other technical team members who wouldn't come because of me (or would have to partially pay out of pocket), I'm happy to pass. That said, if the resources are still there for me to be able to join the retreat, I can think of many productive uses of my time:

Although the website itself may not be a huge topic on its own this round I think it would be both interesting and helpful to break out at points to discuss several foundation/marketing/outreach type issues. I'd also be very interested in trying to identify some common needs among the various working groups that website/evangelism/marketing might be able to help facilitate. (Plus, sitting on those long flights will give me some spare time get pending new.nodejs.org work done.)

Warning: a random list of some ideas/open questions I'd be interested in pursuing follows. Some topics might be worth copying in the agenda thread if there is interest. (Just skip between the lines if you're short on time.)

---

Examples:

• How can we grow the volunteer base by highlighting WG efforts online.
  • Questions like "would it be helpful to offer cookie cutter web portals for each WG" -- to post members list, minutes, projects, communication channels, etc. Could we parse some of this off of what's already being posted on the GitHub repos? etc.
  • How can we better advertise "calls for assistance" in areas where we're lacking volunteer efforts at any given time
  • How do we best communicate the introduction of the Foundation, its goals, open nature, etc. in order to build excitement and help increase participation and adoption.
• By better understanding the current priorities and general roadmaps for the primary Node project (and the various WG "products" being worked on during the summit), it should help me (and the teams) to develop better resources to communicate what's actually going on to our community.
• Another open question is where web/marketing/evangelism volunteer time might best be spent. While the existing nodejs.org repo doesn't yet match our final structural vision (for i18n, new content, etc.), perhaps volunteer time is better spent first on generating new content on it or building specialized micro-sites (Guides, WG portals, a Foundation site, etc.) which could live on subdomains for the time being.

---

While I am not often active in our technical repos (node, iojs, build, etc.), I have been developing production projects in Node.js since 2010. As a result I'm very familiar with the technology and working within the ecosystem. Part of the reason the io.js fork appealed to me so quickly was the opportunity to give back to a community I've long followed but which suddenly seemed way more approachable. (That and a burning desire to use ES6 syntax, hehe.)

[rvagg]

@snostorm we have a capped budget but I believe there is likely room to fit you in although this late in the game flights are going to be more expensive than if they had have been booked a few weeks ago. We lifted the intl travel quota to $1500 so I think you should fit in. @mikeal can you confirm that @snostorm is good to go under the process we outlined? Given his activity in the website group from the beginning and the obvious fact that we have some big holes around the website group which would probably be helped by getting people together I'm a +1 fwiw.

[mikeal]

@yosuke-furukawa the TSC approved a $2,400 total expense for you to use. The flight cap is normally $1,500 but if you can find accommodations that keep your flight and accommodations lower than $2,400 we can cover you just fine.

My mental math says that with the $2,400 total cap in tact for everyone (some exceptions were made for flights but everyone is still below $2,400 total) we can add @snostorm without going over the $15K budget cap so you're good :)

[snostorm]

Thanks for the confirmation @rvagg and @mikeal. I'll be locking in the necessary flights tomorrow morning then. I'm looking forward to participating and meeting everyone in person.

[yosuke-furukawa]

Thank you for the confirmation @mikeal and @rvagg. I am looking forward to the summit.

[Fishrock123]

I'm easily under $1000 travel and also under $900 accommodations once converted from CAD to USD.

Should I post the amount(s) here, or?

[mikeal]

@Fishrock123 no, send me the receipts along with your mailing address and phone number and I'll fill out this spreadsheet form and send it to the right people :)

[jasnell]

Assume this can be closed now?