I'm a little confused. Under the "WMF Staff Questions" section of the registration it's asking "Why should you be sponsored by WMF to attend the Wikimedia Developer Summit?" and it says that "We will only be approving WMF staff to attend this event who are planning to actively engage...", etc. implying that approval to attend the developer summit is contingent on their answer to this question. However, budget owners were already asked to fill out flight and lodging approvals for all of their direct reports (for both the All Staff and Dev Summit). Is there a second round of vetting that will happen at some point? On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 3:37 AM, Bináris <wikiposta(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone, Thank you for your questions so far! :) Bináris: We can commit to deciding and approving a first round of scholarships within 1 week of closing scholarship registration. Scholarship registration closes: October 23 We will approve and announce by: October 31 If there is anybody that has a special time-constraint related circumstance please email qgil(a)wikimedia.org and myself and we will see what we can do to accommodate. Ryan: At the summit this year we would like to know that everybody attending will be engaged and will know why they are attending. Regarding WMF staff, we will be accepting all applicants who have something reasonable written in response to the question you reference. We are assuming that most traveling WMF staff who are willing to be away from home for an additional 3 days and have their managers approval and funding to attend have already thought about and discussed their plan for this event when deciding to allocate the funds and work time, so hopefully it is not a burden to verbalize them to us. Possibly some of the local-to-SF staff have not had had this discussion yet, but they have some additional time to think about why they would like to attend before they apply. If we turn down any WMF staff registrations we will explain why we have done so, and as long as there is still space they can re-apply. Alternately, any WMF staff are welcome to skip the first two days of the Developer Summit and apply only to attend the unscheduled / hacking day. It will take quite an awful response to have an unscheduled-day only registration rejected. C. Scott: Yes, currently the form is asking for session proposals when they cannot yet be proposed. We were hoping to open registration and the call for participation at the same time, weeks ago. This hasn't been possible, as the discussion about main topics hasn't been resolve. The program committee is working to have this part solved by next week but we could not delay opening registration any longer and make issues like Bináris highlights harder on those travelers requiring visas. I hope these answers help! Thank you all very much for your feedback and patience! Rachel On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 11:35 AM, C. Scott Ananian <cananian(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: