[Qgis-psc] Discussion our financial situation

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi Paolo, 

On 2019-11-14 05:44, Paolo Cavallini wrote:

> My comments:
> * the missed expenses for GH migration means that the devs did it
> voluntarily?

That budget item was actually for github to gitlab migration - which did
not really happen and there isn't even consensus that we should do it. 

If you mean the Redmine to Github issue migration - yes, that wasn't
invoiced and thus voluntary work. 

> * I see LC meeting was more expensive than predicted; I understand the
> organizers devoted back a part of the income to QGIS.ORG: does this
> balance off?

What is an LC meeting? Sorry, I don't understand this term. 

> * certification is starting to get momentum; the plan was to have a
> self-sustaining structure, so I believe a part of the surplus should be
> devoted to the development, setup, and management of the infrastructure
> (thanks Tim!)

Yes, it's progressing nicely. I wonder, if in the future, such income
should be dedicated into improving the training material and education
situation? Would make sense to me. As many people pointed out, training
and education, and getting into University curricula seems to be one of
the key factors why ESRI is so successful. It would make sense to
dedicate funds towards this aspect. Not that I have clear ideas what
this means, but maybe others have? 

> I'd appreciate your comments on these points.
> If we end up with a net profit, I suggest reinvesting it mostly in
> bugfixing, secondarily in grant programs (something like 75/25). I
> believe the interesting proposal from Tim can easily fall in the second
> category.

yes 

> I think we should also discuss about:
> * how effective each expense is, to learn from the lesson and do an even
> better allocation for the future

I think most of the expenses (bug fixing definitely, grants, maintenance
of packaging and code reviews, CI, etc.) definitely pay off. There is no
doubt about that. Also investing into our infrastructure is a necessity.
Do you see any expenses that seem unnecessary or ineffective? I don't 

Another thing that we should continue is investing into related and
upstream projects. The qt5 improvement and collaboration with KDAB seems
to have been successful and there would be further improvements that
would be useful. 

> * the balance between paid work and volunteer work, to ensure a fair
> treatment for anybody.

That is always a tough topic. What I can say is that most, if not all,
people who get payments from QGIS.ORG invest in addition at least an
equal amount of time that they invoice to QGIS.ORG. Also enabling our
core devs to dedicate some days in a row an bug fixing and let them
focus in some areas of our code base or grant projects is more effective
in my opinion than trying to come up with complicated other systems,
like estimating things up-front and ask for detailed quotes. This would
only add a lot of administrative burdens and by the time, devs analyzed
things to do a proper quote, they already did most of the work. 

But this is my personal opinion. 

Greetings, 
Andreas
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