Quoting Kapil Hari Paranjape ([email protected]): > 3. I will need to obtain a visa for this travel. Is there a formal > letter that is issued by the organisers that will assist my visa > application?
I don't have answers to KHP's questions (actually, I should say that I don't feel that I have the authority to answer them) but I take this opportunity to insist on the need of having a schedule that's as early as possible if we want to have the opportunity of having more than zero contributors from South Asia (India and neighbour countries) as we had at last Debconfs. All these countries' citizens need a visa to travel to Europe. For most of us who already had to get a visa from their own places, this is definitely *not* the same game. To get a picture of how this can be, ask people who already had to apply for a visa to India (and had to do it themselves)...you'll probably get a picture of 10% of the hassle it can be for citizens of India in their country. They need to go to an embassy or consulate of a EU country to get it and there are few of them in India (for instance, while many of our regular contributors from India live around Bangalore, I think they need to go to Mumbai or even New Dehli to get such services). In order to get a visa, they need to go there *twice* and I'm fairly sure they need to do it "physically". The travel costs are of course incredibly high and, in short, I can easily suspect that none of our potential contributors can afford this on their own (this is of course the case for most *other* contributors) and because this is highly related to visa issues, that brings more need to have things decided in advance. And probably very few of them can have their company/institute fund their participation. I would "personnally" (I should more say "with my i18n hat") really want to have more attendees from "outside our usual places" (namely Europe, Northern America, Latin America and Australia/NZ) but it seems that this requires having some specific treatment, particularly on sponsoring, travel support and visa issues. That may sound slightly like treating people differently but late sponsoring answers have the same result, more or less. I think that, having developed a knowledge network over years because of the i18n work I'm nagging the entire Debian crowd with, I can offer some help in working on this along with the sponsoring team. So please take this as a formal offer to help in these matters, including working with the sponsoring team on this. _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
