A very little bit about how herb works
This information is pieced together from no fewer than five informants. As such it is likely to contain inaccuracies.
Every year, through the conference registration system, a fork of an old version of Pentabarf, attendees declare that they need sponsorship. They state their cost of travel as well as how much of this amount they can afford to pay themselves. In addition, there is a text field in which one is to answer what you do for Debian and why you request sponsorship.
Next a committee is assembled. The head of the committee hand-picks its members. In 2011, twenty-four people were asked if they would like to participate, thirteen people were named to the committee, and twelve of those ended up voting. This committee is named “herb”, after Herbert Powell.
The members of herb each individually rate the applicants on two factors: contribution to Debian and amount requested. Each factor is rated on a five-point scale (-2 to +2). Raters may leave, at their option, a comment regarding the applicant. The raters are able to see previous ratings and comments. In the interest of avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest, each rater will refrain voluntarily from self-rating.
Individual raters use exercise judgment during this process.
“Contribution to Debian” is very subjective, and some raters will vote either on total travel cost, requested amount, the ratio of the two, or something else.
At a certain point in time, a weighted average of all the ratings is used to order all the applicants into a list. At the top will be the people ranked most highly. The herb team will then conduct an IRC meeting in which ranking may be arbitrarily changed and two thresholds will be established.
The result of this process is three lists of people: queue A, for people who should definitely get sponsorship; queue B, for people that might get sponsorship if people from queue A cancel or other circumstances arise; and queue C, which is not really a queue, but a rejection pile. In some cases, the structure of these queues are decided before definite budget numbers are known.
Applicants are emailed to let them know which queues they are in, and their rankings within those queues.