Community Travel Funding

This document explains the rules, priorities, and costs we cover using the conference travel budget.

How We Choose Who Travels

We use the following priority list to decide who gets travel money. This list is for people who already have a visa or have a clear plan to get one in time.

1. People Hired by AsyncAPI (Contracted Staff): These people are the highest priority. They receive a larger budget covering travel, visa, and other costs. The budget is flexible, but they must agree on the required amount with the available funds.
2. People Who Have Not Received Funding Before: The people who have never received travel funding are given higher priority over people who have received it in the past.
3. People with Key Event Jobs: People who agree to help with important duties at the event:
   • Master of Ceremony (MC): Up to two people are needed for this job.
   • API Standards Booth Lead: Up to two people are needed to manage the API Standards booth.
4. Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Members
5. Ambassadors and Maintainers
6. Speakers

A Note on Special Cases: We can change these rules for special situations. For example, for the 2025 conference in India, we chose to only give money to community members who live in India. This way, we could support many more people. The money for one long international trip paid for five local trips. This allowed us to connect a large group of community members who had never met in person.

Problems with Visas and Planning

Getting a visa can take a long time and be stressful, especially when decisions come very late. This makes planning difficult for everyone. To help with smooth planning:

• Tell Us Early: If you want to go to an event, need a visa you don't have, and want our funding, you must tell us 6 months before the event date.
• Start Right Away: Once we confirm that we have money for your travel, you must start the visa application process immediately.
• We Will Help: We will help you get the necessary papers, like official invitation letters. We want to support everyone fairly while making sure our events are organized well.

How Much We Can Pay

The maximum we can pay for one person's travel depends on the destination.

These amounts can be changed depending on how many people need reimbursement for the given event.

We cannot pay for travel in advance. We can reimburse you only through the official process over our Open Collective profile. You will have to submit invoices related to travel and accommodation.

Rules for Each Event

• Budget Announcement: We will announce how much money is available for each event. This depends on our total budget and support from community members whose travel is paid for by their own companies.
• How to Ask for Funding:
  • We will create a special GitHub issue in the asyncapi/community repository for each event, at least three months before the event.
  • To ask for money, please write clearly in that GitHub issue.
  • If you cannot write publicly for work reasons, you can contact the Chairperson of the Conference Coordination Working Group directly.
• How We Decide When There Are Too Many People: If more people want funding than we have money for, and the priority list above doesn't help us choose, we will use a randomizer. We will put all names into the randomizer during Community Working Group meeting. The first person (or people) picked will get the funding, depending on how much money is left.