TPAC Fellows Honoraria timeline

[dontcallmedom]

Commenting on the TPAC Fellows stipend based on my experience with the program last year - first, thanks a lot for bringing stability and robustness to what had to be brought together at the last minute last year!

Having people apply to that fund by mid August is unlikely to work with the schedule of when breakouts get proposed; right now, my expectation is that we will open the call for breakout proposals around that time, and even once open, we only managed to finalize the list Fellows that ran sessions a week before the actual week.

Given that these are honorariums more than reimbursements, the required timeline of having people paid is probably different from the cases of people having advanced money for expenses, so may not need as tight a schedule either.

[LJWatson]

I wonder if we could co-ordinate the two things?

We could, for example, enable people who propose breakout sessions to apply for a stipend at the same time. Then the representatives from PWE and W3M nominated to make decisions could co-ordinate with you as "breakouts representative" to select the successful applicants perhaps?

[dontcallmedom]

my worry about combining the two is that the vast majority (if not the totality) of people who will propose breakouts through whatever system we put in place will be part of the W3C membership, for which the program doesn't apply but will likely create false positive and wrong expectations.

Conversely, and unless things change significantly compared to last year, most of the external breakout proposals will be ones that are curated and sought after by people from the W3C community actively working with people from external communities - more of a pull process than a push. At the point they are defined enough to come through the submission workflow, the expectations around honoriaria would need to be already clear enough that the people organizing the said sessions feel they can commit to them.

I'm afraid I don't have a very specific counter-proposal beyond a less formal and a more iterative process for these, and in particular a more relaxed timeline.

[TzviyaSiegman]

@dontcallmedom if we shifted the deadline for fellows to align with the deadline for submitting proposals for the breakouts, what would the date be? Note that this means that the fellows would likely not receive the stipend until after tpac. This information would need to be added to the form.

[dontcallmedom]

current plan is that this category of proposals would be submitted and approved two weeks ahead of the TPAC breakout week, i.e. on October 4, although again, based from past experience, we'll likely need flexibility with these deadlines.

My sense is that in general, it is not particularly problematic for honoriaria to be paid after TPAC - this is a payment, not a reimbursement, and so would be expected to happen after the fact.

[wseltzer]

Let's do that! The two funds will have different closing dates, which is ok because they're aimed at distinct funding purposes.

[koalie]

Meta-comment that the terminology to use is s/stipend/honorari{a,um}/

[LJWatson]

We didn't get the timeline question resolved. Did the fellows information/application form get released?

[koalie]

Hi @LJWatson, the fellows information/application form isn't ready. I don't know who has the ball (not do I understand yet the timeline). @dontcallmedom ?

[dontcallmedom]

my expectation was that I would drive candidate fellows through this process as their proposals would emerge, but no such proposal has emerged so far, even with some of the pro-active research I tried to motivate. There may be late good surprises, but otherwise, it sounds like we may not get any TPAC unconference fellow this year :(

[wseltzer]

Thanks for the update @dontcallmedom