To establish and administer a fund for members of the OpenJS Foundation to travel and spread knowledge about and support the Javascript ecosystem and the Foundation.
- Candidates must be an active participant of one of the projects of the OpenJS Foundation.
- An active member of a project community is someone who has had recent, sustained contributions to the project during the past 90 days.
- All projects in the foundation, regardless of stage or incubation status, are eligible to use the travel fund, this includes employees of the foundation member companies as well.
- The fund can cover the costs, in whole or in part, of a contributor's hotel, airfare, and event registration (for OpenJS World and the Collab Summit)
- Fund Applicants should seek to use employer funds as a first resort. Need is a factor.
Requests must be made prior to the start of travel. Requests submitted once travel is complete will not be approved.
It is strongly recommended that you submit your request far enough in advance to get approval before making relevant expenditures. Review of requests will take at least 72 hours and may take considerably longer. Note, with limited funds available, approval is not guaranteed. If a request is rejected, reimbursement will not be issued. The Foundation cannot pre-pay for travel expenditures.
For all events, 3rd party or hosted Foundation events, it is recommended to apply for a visa at least 6 months prior to an event.
If you need a visa for the country in which the OpenJS Foundation event you are attending is being held, see the document on preparing for a visa application.
The Foundation provides guidance on preparing your visa application, including information on visa processing times and a checklist of items that a visa application could require.
For Foundation-hosted events, the OpenJS Foundation provides a visa letter by The
Linux Foundation (does not guarantee visa approval). You can find the Visa Request
page under Attend > Visa Request.
Please note that unless the Foundation is specifically hosting the event, we cannot help with visa letters. The Foundation is also not able to contact consulates. When the Foundation has done this in the past, our efforts have been unsuccessful and/or we’ve lacked the expertise to be effective.
For additional information on preparing your visa application or requesting a visa letter, please email visainfo@openjsf.org.
- Open a pull request that adds an entry to the appropriate year's file
- Include as many fields as possible:
- The name of the event you plan to attend.
- The location, dates of the event and where you will be traveling from.
- The presentation you intend to give, if applicable.
- The size of the stipend you wish to receive.
- In the pull request description, explain how you calculated your stipend. For example, include estimates for airfare, hotel, other transportation, and so on. The total amount should be your stipend request.
- In the PR description, mention @openjs-foundation/cpc.
- Once the final amount spent is known, update the table again with that information.
- Certain details of your request (such as the column for date sent to finance) may be unknown initially; these can be filled in and updated during the process of reconciliation.
- Include as many fields as possible:
A request is approved when all of the following criteria are met:
- The pull request has been open for at least 72 hours.
- The request has approval from at least four members of @openjs-foundation/cpc.
- No members of @openjs-foundation/cpc have objected to the request.
- The pull request has been merged. Any member may merge once other prerequisites have been met.
If a request is blocked by an objection from a member of @openjs-foundation/cpc, then the only way for the request to be approved is for that committee to decide to approve the request using whatever decision-making process the committee uses when consensus is not reached.
As examples, the purpose of prior sponsored travels includes attending TC39 meetings, attending OpenJS collaboration summits, and mentoring Code and Learn.
While members from any OpenJS project can request approval for travel through
the process outlined in the Approval section, there may be situations in which
a project wishes to manage the approvals an event or purpose instead of
leveraging this process.
A project may request an allocation from the travel fund as follows:
- Open a PR in the
cross-project-council
repo with the following info:
- Name of event or purpose for allocation
- Who will be approvers for request (for example Node.js TSC and CommComm)
- Repo/process through which approvals will be made. This process should capture at least the information in the "Requesting Travel Funds" section
- Time period for which the allocation will be in use
- Brief description
- The CPC will review and approve if appropriate
- At the completion of the event/allocation period or when re-imbursement is to be paid out the project will PR in the approvals into the appropriate year's file. This PR will be approved and landed by CPC members. Due to the pre-approval of the request from the project the only validation should be against the total that had been previouly approved by the CPC.
- Preference is given to events hosted or sponsored by the OpenJS Foundation. For example, OpenJS Collaboration summits and Diagnostics summits should be given precedence because they bring together members of the Foundation to help the Foundation projects advance.
- Preference is given to speakers and panelists of a conference. Speaking and doing panels at a conference generates a more significant impact than attending. However, individuals applying for the travel fund to speak or participate in panels should confirm that the event organizers cannot cover the travel expenses before submitting a request.
- Preference is given to underserved communities. More specifically, within a subject the foundation is trying to promote awareness about (e.g. general knowledge about the Foundation) there are people, communities, and geographies where that knowledge is not very widespread. This is where preference will be given. For instance, an event in San Francisco would be less attractive than an event of the same size in Kansas City.
- The larger the stipend the more critically the travel fund admins will consider the request and application. The budget for this program is a finite resource.
- Preference is given to individuals who cannot receive travel funding from their employers or individuals who have not previously received a stipend.
So that we can reimburse you more quickly, we strongly encourage you to use Expensify to organize and submit your receipts. Please see our guide to creating and configuring a free Expensify account.
- A free Expensify account is sufficient.
- You can use the Android and iOS apps to capture receipts while you are traveling. If you do not use the app, you will need to upload photos of your receipts after you return.
- When you add an expense, please use local currency so that it matches the amount on the receipt.
- Once you have uploaded your receipts, please add them to a report and submit it with operations@openjsf.org on cc, and the Memo field set to "YOURNAME - TRIPNAME".
When we receive your report, we will send you a form via DocuSign to collect your payment details. At that point, you're done.
If you decide not to use Expensify, the reimbursement process is manual and may take longer for us to process. You can email a zip file of your receipts and the completed Expense Report, renamed as ExpenseReport-OpenJS-EVENTNAME-YOURNAME-YYYYMM.xls, to operations@openjsf.org. Please send the file as a spreadsheet, not as a PDF. We will send it back to you for signature in DocuSign.
- Expense reports must be submitted within 30 days of event date. Any reports submitted after 30 days may not be reimbursed.
- Disbursements are generally processed within 30 days.
- We are unable to pre-pay for expenses.
- The Cross Project Council representative to the Board of Directors will report back amounts consumed from the travel allocation on a monthly basis to the Board.
The request from the Node.js Technical Steering Committee and the Node.js Community Committee for a 2018 joint travel fund was approved in the amount of $60,000. The $60,000 was fully utilized in 2018.
The request from the Node.js Technical Steering Committee and the Node.js Community Committee for a 2019 joint travel fund was approved in the amount of $60,000.
The request from the Cross Project council for a 2020 joint travel fund was approved in the amount of $60,000.
Please direct any questions or concerns about the travel fund to travelapprovals@openjsf.org.