DebConf 17 bursaries: update your status now!
TL;DR: if you applied for a DebConf 17 travel bursary, and you haven’t accepted it yet, login to the DebConf website and update your status before June 20th or your bursary grant will be gone.
*blows dust off the blog*
As you might be aware, DebConf 17 is coming soon and it’s gonna be the biggest DebConf in Montréal ever.
Of course, what makes DebConf great is the people who come together to work on Debian, share their achievements, and help draft our cunning plans to take over the world. Also cheese. Lots and lots of cheese.
To that end, the DebConf team had initially budgeted US$40,000 for travel grants ($30,000 for contributors, $10,000 for diversity and inclusion grants), allowing the bursaries team to bring people from all around the world who couldn’t have made it to the conference.
Our team of volunteers rated the 188 applications, we’ve made a ranking (technically, two rankings : one on contribution grounds and one on D&I grounds), and we finally sent out a first round of grants last week.
After the first round, the team made a new budget assessment, and thanks to the support of our outstanding sponsors, an extra $15,000 has been allocated for travel stipends during this week’s team meeting, with the blessing of the DPL.
We’ve therefore been able to send a second round of grants today.
Now, if you got a grant, you have two things to do : you need to accept your grant, and you need to update your requested amount. Both of those steps allow us to use our budget more wisely: having grants expire frees money up to get more people to the conference earlier. Having updated amounts gives us a better view of our overall budget. (You can only lower your requested amount, as we can’t inflate our budget)
Our system has sent mails to everyone, but it’s easy enough to let that email slip (or to not receive it for some reason). It takes 30 seconds to look at the status of your request on the DebConf 17 website, and even less to do the few clicks needed for you to accept the grant. Please do so now! OK, it might take a few minutes if your SSO certificate has expired and you have to look up the docs to renew it.
The deadline for the first round of travel grants (which went out last week) is June 20th. The deadline for the second round (which went out today) is June 24th. If somehow you can’t login to the website before the deadline, the bursaries team has an email address you can use.
We want to send out a third round of grants on June 25th, using the money people freed up: our current acceptance ratio is around 40%, and a lot of very strong applications have been deferred. We don’t want them to wait up until July to get a definitive answer, so thanks for helping us!
À bientôt à Montréal !
