First Draft of Conservancy's Travel Policy: open for discussion

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Attached please find the first draft of the Conservancy travel policy.
Tony Sebro has done much work reviewing the various travel policies that
some projects have in place, plus those used around other non-profit
organizations.  Based on that research, he and I have come up with the
attached draft for your review.

Probably the most controversial issue that we've decided is to go with a
per diem for all travel expenses other than airfare and lodging.  We
thought a great deal about this question, and I had a lot of interesting
discussions with the Samba project (which is currently the only
Conservancy project using a per diem system), and I became convinced it
was the right thing to do.

Specifically, we just did Conservancy's annual budget and sadly, it
doesn't look like we'll be able to hire a bookkeeper this year, which
means for the foreseeable future, I'll continue to do the bookkeeping
work myself.  Processing receipts for travel reimbursement is a huge
time commitment, and going to a per diem will greatly reduce the time
necessary to process those.

Also, it saves work for the travelers themselves.  They don't need to
keep individual receipts other than airfare and lodging: they just need
to document the days of the event, etc. and ask for the right number.


Another problem we have is what airfare comparison site to use.  We
originally had kayak.com in the draft, but I changed it to FIXME, when I
realized this morning that kayak.com downloads non-Free-Software
Javascript to run, and it doesn't seem to work at all with NoScript.

Orbitz.com does work without Javascript, but that doesn't include all
the possible airlines in the way that kayak.com does, so it's not an
easy option.

I admittedly install the non-Free Javascript myself and use kayak.com to
search for fares, but I'm not comfortable with a Conservancy policy that
mandates that projects use non-free software.  If anyone has ideas on
another site to use that doesn't require Javascript, or can exhibit a
way to use kayak.com to make it work without Javascript, I'd appreciate
it.


Meanwhile, I'm sure there are plenty of other things that folks will
have input on and/or discussion about in the attached policy.  Please
try to keep subthreads about a specific topic (and change subject lines
when switching topics) to make sure folks can easily follow the
discussion.  Thanks!

We have no specific timeline for this travel policy to go into effect;
we'll let the conversation proceed naturally and see when it starts to
reach consensus.  We want to get it done soon if we can, but we also
want to get adequate feedback from all of you before we do.

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Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy