Business/First class airfare tickets policy.

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

[ Most of this email is a rant about how difficult it is to design and
  enforce a travel policy for the wildly different constituencies that
  Conservancy has to serve.  It is admittedly a rant, so take it for what it
  is and feel free to skip this post. ]

Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> There must be a lot of folks doing the opposite for this to even be an
> issue.

The issue is that we have basically three classes of travelers:

 (a) Geeks who have their own sense of "reasonableness", which isn't *wrong*
    or attempting to game the system, but they also don't want to read and
    learn the policy, they'd rather just "do whatever" -- which is more or
    less reasonable but often violates the rules.  Then we have a complex
    back-end problem to post-hoc justify their reasonable but non-compliant
    behavior.  (Also in this category is geeks who have traveled under
    corporate policies and have a distaste for any detailed rules, so they
    ignore the rules as a matter of pride).

 (b) New people to our community whose *first* life experience *ever* of
     being reimbursed for travel is through Conservancy.  They're going to be
     lost no matter what.

 (c) Frankly, entitled, aggressive folks who think of their project's money
     as their personal fund to do what they want with, and who hold the
     entire process in contempt.  (These are the people Andrew means are
     "doing the opposite").

I am pretty sympathetic to Group (a), and I feel like we *should*, given our
hyper-transparency and willingness to discuss this publicly, should be able
to get a policy that Group (a) can (perhaps begrudgingly) follow.  All the
discussion in this history of this list has been trying to make whatever
Group (a) thinks to just work out ok by default.  We've mostly failed,
because as geeks often do, folks in Group (a) have wildly different and
strong opinions on alternative approaches that are all completely reasonable,
but they can't all be codified perfectly.  (Nevertheless, there are, BTW, a
few other travelers in Group (a) who have been won over over the years.  We
have one traveler who was once the most frequent violator of the policy who
I'd now consider near perfect in his filings and has taught others in his
project how to follow the policy).

Group (b) is well-meaning but frustrating, as they err a lot.  They're
apologetic, but still require a lot of time.  I am still baffled what to do
about them (see more below on Karen's attempt with the auditors), as things
like "quick summaries" of the policy have not worked in those cases.

Group (c) are the ones that are just painful to deal with, as you might
guess, and they make me want to rage-quit and ask Conservancy's Board to
never reimburse travel again.  Admittedly, it's a tiny minority, but they
take literally person-days and sometimes even person-weeks of work when they
travel.  We've had one or two travelers that I calculated where staff spent
30-40 hours just on processing one of their trips.

I started this thread primarily about the (c) group, because in that (c)
group have the "just pay me the maximum possible for first class when I say
to do so; you figure out how to make it comply with your stupid travel
policy" attitude.  I admit that I'd probably have a different position about
the first class question if the people originally asking for it weren't
coming from this sense of entitlement camp. (Everyone who is actually
commenting on this thread seem to primarily coming from Group (a), so I tend
to find their arguments persuasive, but OTOH the silent catalysts for this
thread are Group (c) folks.).

I really don't like the idea of capitulating to Group (c), because it kinda
justifies this idea that the entitled should get to do whatever they want.  I
also have a hard time reconciling the mission value of giving Group (c) what
they want.

An anecdotal digression: I booked a flight for a 18 year old project
contributor a few years ago.  He was leaving his own country for the first
time in his life; flying on a plane for the first time.  He was nervous about
his trip to go speak at a conference, but excited too.  I was privmsg'ing him
on IRC to get his flight booked, and I asked him "aisle or window", and he
said [paraphrased]... "Well, I'd really like a window, but please don't pay
extra for it.  I'd just really like to see out the window for my first plane
trip".  Notwithstanding the goofy "Basic Economy" mess (see other thread), of
course window seats don't cost more and I put him in a Window.  It was
hands-on work and I don't like playing travel agent, but this experience made
me feel like: "wow, this is exactly the kind of thing Conservancy should be
doing -- giving real opportunities to developers who live in non-wealthy
countries to interact with the FOSS community."

Contrast *that* kind of traveler with a USA-based person, who likely gets
paid so much that they'd never notice if they didn't get reimbursed, who then
takes the attitude of "I only sit in first class, pay me the max from the
policy I can get, and you do the paperwork to justify it".  When I think of
that, I have a hard time justifying making the policy convenient and easy for
the latter.  So, my goal is to make Group (b) the happiest (if possible), and
hopefully appease Group (a), who are well-meaning but sometimes obstinate.
I'm frankly inclined to tell Group (c) to go jump in a first-class lake.

I realize that makes me biased, but frankly I don't do the boring work of
helping keep Conservancy running and processing reimbursements to make life
easy for privileged dudes (and yes, everyone who has been in Group (c) have
been dudes) who want us to help them fly first class. :)

If I had my way, I'd siphon the extra few hundred of budget from the people
in Group (c) that they're trying to apply to first class tickets, and give it
in a lottery to Group (b) to pay for them fly first class once in a while.
Yes, that's not fair either, but I'm saying that just to give you a sense of
where my mindset is.

  * * *

Meanwhile, regarding your other comments, Andrew, please don't conflate
different parts of the policy, or compare the policy from a long time ago to
the one we're using today.

> When I last travelled under this policy, I had to get exceptions for every
> flight

Note that the last time you traveled (according to the books anyway) on
Conservancy funds was 2012, more than half a decade ago. :) The policy has
changed a lot since then, particularly with regard to flight pricing.

> and I recall the hotel was also a problem.  (GSA rates not covering
> things because we are not the Government).

That's a known bug and there is a fix already pending for that, which would
actually solve Deb's comment (i.e., using the GSA rates + 120%).  As Michael,
explains the GSA rates in the USA are based on government rates that we
can't get.  Dept of State rates, by contrast, are in our experience quite
ample for non-USA locations.

But, I'd encourage us to avoid thread-drift to hotel discussion -- with
that planned fix, I think the hotel situation is going to get a lot
easier and I don't expect it to be a problem in future in the way
flight pricing is.

> The single most valuable commodity in my view is not money, but time.

FWIW, we are completely dog-fooding on this.  The real time we lose is
Conservancy staff time for people who don't want to spend a modicum of time
reading the policy, which I don't think is a huge time investment.  Yes,
there is "ramp up" time to learn the policy, but once one knows it well, it
is actually very quick to book travel and remain compliant.

We have tried various means to make the policy more loose.  For example, we
tried to make a rule that all travel under $500 need no receipts at all,
which was primarily to make things easier for a big part of Group (b) -- the
Outreachy interns who get $500 travel budgets each.  Sadly, our auditors
nixed that idea.  Karen tried to come up with three other methods to convince
the auditors to make documentation for small-cost travel easier.  They
rejected them all.

> We should ensure we also optimise for time of both the conservancy and
> project volunteers, not just cash.

Here's the thing: everyone I talk to who deals with a company's travel policy
says ours is more flexible, more reasonable, and easier to work with.  I
agree with you about time -- in fact, that's *why* Brett designed that
complex algorithm -- to *save* people's flight time.  (I don't know about
you, but I'd gladly rather spend an extra 20 minutes learning a complex
policy algorithm once to save me many hours of being on a longer
flights/layovers in the future).  But, then we get attacked for having too
complex an algorithm!

Experience shows us we cannot win; my gut feeling is that everyone who
travels on Conservancy funds will always hate us unless expense reports are
reduced to: "wire me $x.  Take my word for it that I complied with the
policy.  No receipts included."  And, I'm frustrated enough that if we felt
that was defensible to our auditors and the IRS, we'd definitely *do it*.
But we can't.

The demoralizing thing for me (as the primary person who has to interpret
this policy) is people who believe their entitled to be reimbursed for
"whatever they think is reasonable" -- and for wildly different reasons, we
have such people coming from both Group (a) and (c).  In some sense, we've
been far too nice to travelers.  We grant all sorts of exceptions based on
reasonableness, and have spent countless hours trying to design a policy that
minimizes the exception hatches and makes "the reasonable just work".  On the
one hand, as I mention, we have people who work for companies telling us:
"Wow, this policy is so much more reasonable than the one my company uses"
and on the other hand, we have people criticizing it, as you are, as too
complex and too difficult to travel under.

I truly don't know who to believe anymore.  I admit that because I travel a
lot *and* (for everyone but myself), I'm the primary interpreter and enforcer
of the policy, I don't see it as all that difficult, and it is MUCH better
than every other policy that *I've* ever traveled under, at both for-profit
and non-profit employers.  But I also admit I have a biased view because I'm
close to the thing.  (Note, however, that while I'm currently the primary
expert on the policy, I didn't write hardly any of the policy -- it was
primarily written by Tony Sebro, with help from Peter Brown, -- so I'm *not*
close to the text of it in that regard.  If you look at the commit logs,
you'll see I've only made minor corrections/improvements over the years).

I certainly have better things I'd rather be doing in life than enforcing a
travel policy; I am not doing this work because I *like* it.  The problem is
that it's the *primary* thing that projects spend their money on, and our
auditors have been extremely clear with us that we need a detailed policy
that we actually enforce given the high amount of revenue we spend on sending
project contributors on travel.

I realize I've brought up a lot of meta-issues that aren't about the one
policy that I started this thread with.  But, hopefully my rant here informs
what I'm trying to balance.  In short, I want to reward the people like
Andrew who want to do what's reasonable but also want to save time in reading
a detailed policy if possible, but I don't want that to de-facto make it easy
for those who want to treat project funds like a slush fund to just get away
with "whatever they like".  I want the proverbial cake eating and having it
too.
--
Bradley M. Kuhn

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