We used to collect speaker suggestions for IndiaFOSS. You submit the speaker’s details in a form, and we would send them an email saying “someone suggested you should speak at IndiaFOSS, here’s the CFP”.
We didn’t see much response so we dropped this. We can use a similar workflow here. Open up a call for suggestions and send an email to everyone with a link to the CFP. Meanwhile, the program committee can have a look at the suggestions and decide if anyone from the list fits as an invited speaker. If yes, we can follow the similar process that we do for other invited speakers. “Community Pick” sounds nice. I don’t have any strong feelings against a forum thread either.
The travel reimbursement part is an IndiaFOSS edition-specific discussion (meaning that this will be a call we will take every year, depending on how much budget we have. I’m not against providing speaker support one or two years down the line if the surplus continues to grow.) I don’t think we need to worry too much about this right now - this is a messaging problem that we can solve later on. The idea of community suggested invited speakers makes sense.