Agenda for next board meeting - bursary reimbursement process

@Pirate Praveen oh! That would be bursary application/selection process (not just reimbursement). @Ravi Dwivedi is that what you meant? I thought you were talking about specifically how to apply for reimbursement at the end.

@Badri Sunderarajan yes, that would come under the bursary process, but better to define some guideline for cases like this. Can you propose draft resolutions? For this case and also for the reimbursement process.

@Badri Sunderarajan Yes, that should be called "bursary process". For a concrete example, consider NLBRT's case. They want to travel to Mumbai for representing Prav in MumbaiFOSS on the 19th of April given that we can cover their travel expenses. However, we may have some local volunteers for the representation. So, should we spend money or raise funds for travel expenses in these cases?

@Pirate Praveen mentioned in personal chat with me this idea of considering such requests based on factors like how active that person is. There could be other factors like whether we have a local community there.

@Pirate Praveen let me think. I guess one way is, if we vaguely know which are the important conferences coming up, we can reserve some budget for those, and afterwards we can allocate to local conferences prioritising lower-costs (eg. people who already live nearby/are involved in the community) but having at least one person who's been reasonably involved in Prav itself.

@Ravi Dwivedi oh, your reply came in as I was drafting mine! I guess we are thinking on similar lines though 🙂

@Badri Sunderarajan though we are not sure if there will be volunteers for all conferences (based on location and date). So we might miss some volunteers, but we can always use the funds for future conferences. So it is a balancing act, I think it might be ok to do trial and error and make some mistakes.

@Badri Sunderarajan Yes, we are thinking along similar lines :) Think of this practical scenario where NLBRT needs travel expenses to travel to Mumbai. How will we decide to grant them funds even if we have funds?

For now, we need to think what happens if we have a couple of volunteers from Mumbai or nearby. Should we grant NLBRT funds in that case? Should we start raising funds for them?

@Ravi Dwivedi there is also the question of whether NLBRT wants to attend only this specific conference or can go to some other more nearby conference if that is happening later. i.e. how restricted are we in terms of which conferences someone can potentially attend

@Badri Sunderarajan I don't see any FOSS United conferences close to their location (Patna was the closest from their place - that distance is same as Lucknow is for me). It might be the case that they will be announced later.

@Ravi Dwivedi okay. But we are talking about the generic case right? So, had there in fact been a FOSS United (or other Free Software related) conference close to their location, it would have been a good idea to take that into account!