Discuss travel fund budget

[tobie]

In #1409 (comment), @joyeecheung suggested the following:

Not sure if this is the right meeting but it may be worth discussing the travel fund budget of the upcoming Node.js collaboration summit? openjs-foundation/summit#433 (comment) The summary is that if every participants of the interest survey requests the highest estimated budget that they had, this would be a bit over ~20K USD in total. In the last Node.js TSC meeting with Robin the suggestion was

1. Prioritize applicants that are Node.js collaborators and TSC (you can find the list in the Node.js README https://github.com/nodejs/node)
2. Prioritize requests with smaller amount
3. Prioritize applicants that would help diversity (from a glance I don't think any survey participant would help improve gender diversity though)

Also a heads up that there would be an influx of travel fund applications to review in recent days. It would help the summit a great deal if applications that should be prioritized can be granted in a speedy manner, thanks.

[tobie]

We're planning to address the diversity aspects by doing outreach before events. The idea would be to remind people to submit their applications early and that we have a policy to earmark 25% of the fund to support the travel of underrepresented groups.

Additionally, we'd want to add information on our transparency report to see how well we meet that diversity policy. Tracking here: #1415

@joyeecheung: please let us know how well this addresses your comment and if there's anything else we could do.

[joyeecheung]

I think the issue with diversity is just a reflection of the issue in the project itself and isn't something that the travel fund can help with, especially for an event like this where most people would travel for the summit alone, which already requires some kind of investment or participation in the project already - there just aren't that many women active in the issue tracker and those who are active probably have other priorities than attending a summit if they aren't participating in the attendance survey (even I don't always commit to attend all the summits, just that the recent ones have been convenient enough for me or that I feel motivated enough to volunteer to co-organize so kinda have to be there). What might help is probably finding some good event that already has a more diverse audience that we can colocate with but this has been a lot harder since COVID. Or just to improve the diversity of the project first which is a separate issue (the generic interest/ investment/contribution in the project has been in decline for years, which can be seen from the state of the CI and amount of issues left untriaged, or just the declining number of summit attendees regardless of background, so declining diversity is also just part of the general trend of declining contribution).