Another question I have (which may, or may not, be out of scope for this task) is... How do we make sure the right non-engineering staff get to the Hackathon? e.g. product managers, community liaisons, designers, etc.

An example of why the attendance of non-engineering staff can sometimes be important is the Wikidata Query Service. Me chatting to all the excited users of the beta service at the Hackathon led to Discovery prioritising a production release more highly.

Thanks @Deskana! I completely agree and while it is a bit out of scope, it is still important. @QuimGil and I will be helping to manage scholarships and will also take things like this into consideration. Often we can accept a good majority of the solid and well thought out scholarships. I will be sending an email to engineering@ raising a few issues and pointing people here to discuss issues specific to WMF approval within a day or two.

It's not very clear from the phrasing whether this is about the number of WMF staff whose participation is reimbursed from the travel budget, or the total number of WMF staff allowed to participate, regardless of who pays for it? In either case, it seems like a strange process and it would be interesting to see the justification behind it. If this is about the total number of staff, why is there a need to limit that at all? If it is about the budget, then

1. Why is there a headcount limit instead of a dollar limit? Traveling from the US costs 2-3 times more so this seems like it will result in less people participating than the budget would make it possible, and drive the cost of participation up (since there is no incentive to do otherwise).
2. Why is there a central budget restriction at all? As I understand it, the reason for reorganizing WMF Engineering into verticals was so that they can have their own budget and decisions about money can happen in a more decentralized manner; why is the process not following that structure?
3. Why is there need for such a process at all? I thought there was a per-employee yearly travel budget and this seems completely orthogonal to that.

Thanks @Tgr

The size of the event space and the availability of hotel space both limit the number of WMF staff.
This size limit is defined by the size of the event venue and the event organizers intended ratios of people attending. WMF v. volunteer international v. volunteer local.

Every hackathon (both wikimania and wikimedia hackathons) are defined by the organizing team of that specific event and they may not be exact mirror images to each other in terms of size and ratio of WMF that is aimed for.

We are hoping that in Jerusalem there will not be an issue here, because the cost of sending SF and European based WMF staff is high and we are guessing that there will not be available budget for huge numbers of travelers. If we get into a situation where we have way more than 50 WMF staff approved to attend we will revisit this and this about solutions.

There is no central budget restriction for WMF staff. The budget restrictions come from the managers of individual team.

The need for this process is so that we try to ensure that we have equal representation from different parts of WMF. An example of why we asked managers to collaborate and speak with each other is so that we avoid situations where (just as a completely random example - not based on expectations) 50 people from Ops, RelEng and Mobile signed up first and there was no room for any WMF staff from other Product and Technology teams.

Does that help? Did I miss addressing anything you asked?