Handling sponsorship requests

[Lydia Pintscher]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 18:14, Teo Mrnjavac <teo at kde.org> wrote:
> Hello KDE-www people,
>
> I'm writing with my GSoC org admin hat on about an idea that could be
> very good for KDE as a whole.
>
> Lydia and I have been discussing how KDE handles travel sponsorship
> for students, and generally how sponsorship applications are handled.
>
> Would it be possible to deploy some kind of solution for handling any
> and all kinds of reimbursement and sponsorship requests from members?
> Ideally we'd have an interface for contributors to apply, make their
> case and then later send in receipts. It might be also a good idea if
> an eV member could vouch for someone's application (think new GSoC/SoK
> students applying for Akademy sponsorship). From the eV board side I
> guess they could use an overview of requests, funds and maybe a way to
> rate them and sort a list by priority. Maybe such a software already
> exists and can be integrated into our existing infrastructure (i.e.
> identity.k.o and sprints.k.o). I guess the workload would greatly
> depend on this.
>
> Now, SoK applications close in less than a week. Could this be a SoK
> project for a student maybe? Is anybody available to mentor?
>
> As you might know, there have also been some discussions about the
> transparency of criteria. While I do not doubt that the board handles
> requests as diligently and fairly as possible, judging from the
> information I have it is a very manual, tedious and tough task. Having
> a software framework for handling these kind of requests could greatly
> improve the perception of transparency.
>
> I would appreciate if a board member could comment a bit on the need
> and requirements for this solution, and if someone from the KDE-www
> team could comment on the feasibility.

Thanks, Teo!

So I guess what we'd need this for is larger stuff like Akademy
sponsorship mainly. For this we'd need to have a way for the
contributor to enter all the information asked for in the
reimbursement policy. From the board side we'd need a way for each
board member to ack or reject a request and leave a comment. It should
be possible for each board member and Claudia to close a request and
email the contributor with a decision and some additional comments. It
should also be possible to send reminders for outstanding requests to
individual board members.
Claudia would have to say what she'd like to see in the system that
would make her work easier. She's on vacation for the rest of the week
though.


Cheers
Lydia

-- 
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
KDE Community Working Group / KDE e.V. board member
http://kde.org - http://open-advice.org