[Qgis-psc] QGIS budget 2023 RFC
Jeff McKenna
jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com
Wed Dec 7 06:35:41 PST 2022
Dear Marco,
I want to thank-you for this summary, and give you specifically a pat on
the back (or hug?). Yes it's a whole community, but you took the time
to tackle a summary of topics that can be quite sensitive. You are
doing a great job as the chair. (sometimes we forget to thank people
directly) Life isn't easy, but your summary really helped make sense of
it all.
Thank-you,
-jeff
(no title, just a huge longtime supporter of QGIS & QGIS.ORG)
On 2022-12-06 11:57 a.m., Marco Bernasocchi via QGIS-Developer wrote:
> Dear all, thanks a lot for all the feedback,
>
>
> As you might remember, the aim of the thread was indeed to discuss the
> proposed budget, so I'll to try to address most of the mentioned points
> in all emails without a specific order, trying to convey how things came
> to this proposal and why the PSC believes it is the best way forward for
> QGIS.org.
>
>
> As a first reminder, all the discussions happened in public, and you can
> read the minutes at https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/wiki#psc-meetings
> <https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/wiki#psc-meetings>.
>
>
> The proposal came out of a need to solve a pressing issue we've been
> dragging along for some time now and "escalated" when Harrisou sent once
> again an appeal for help, and nobody from the developer ml responded [1]:
>
> I'll quote it as a reminder of the stark message showing how alone he
> felt in his efforts:
>
>
>>It's reassuring to discover that there are other channels; at
>
>>least I can say to myself that the total silence to my call is not due to
>
>>some disinterest. - Harrisou
>
>
> Even to this, the only answers were from Tim suggesting to Harrisou to
> join the next PSC to find solutions. The result of the PSC discussions
> was the proposal to add a full-time paid documentation person to
> effectively help Harrisou do what he has been trying to do for years
> alone. He is doing a tremendous job in a part of the project where it is
> challenging to get resources committed to it, and even when there were
> funds available, funded documentation efforts thus far have barely
> scratched the surface of the work that needs to be done. Even to the
> appeal above, the only answers were from Tim suggesting to Harrisou to
> join the next PSC to find solutions.
>
>
> Harrisou and Tim (Harrissou looking after docs, Tim looking after
> various web servers & sites) stand, as volunteers, to amplify their
> efforts through the paid helpers rather than have their efforts replaced
> by paid people.
>
>
> Regarding the QGIS infrastructure, the fact is that despite trying to
> onboard other people as volunteers, nobody is that interested in working
> on these things. Tim mentioned personally having walked various people
> through 'onboarding' as a sysadmin, and nothing came of it. Richard and
> Jürgen (who also help manage the infrastructure) may have different
> feelings, but Tim feels he is (allow me a direct quote here with his
> permission) "getting older and dumber," and we should have a plan in
> place to make sure the infrastructure that keeps the project running is
> professionally managed even when he will be too busy running his
> ever-growing farm :)
>
> Jürgen also mentioned the same issue regarding the infrastructure behind
> windows packaging in the past.
>
>
> Regarding transparency of the decision proposed, I'd like to separate
> the issue into three parts; 1) transparency regarding using Kartoza as a
> proxy, 2) transparency in hiring and finally and 3) transparency in the
> process of deciding to try hiring ‘outside’ people to support our project.
>
>
> Starting with the last point, I'd like to remind you all that we are
> indeed discussing if we want to accept this proposal right here in this
> thread, and finally, it will go to the voting members for
> decision-making. I really need help seeing how the PSC is not being
> transparent here. I'm saddened to see a perception of us trying to hide
> things when all is openly discussed/logged in reality.
>
>
> Regarding using Kartoza as a proxy company, it was indeed not selected
> based on being an open call - much like we appoint trusted developers to
> do bug fixing or other key efforts for the project. We are thankful to
> Kartoza for taking over the burden of doing it. Quoting Tim again: "It
> is only a hassle for us, and I only offered to do it through Kartoza to
> ‘make it happen’ rather than some desire to do it through Kartoza".
> Obviously, if the community wishes to use another company/individuals
> here, it is absolutely no problem to open the proxy up to another
> company. If anyone is interested, please contact the PSC mailing list
> with a concrete proposal on how to go forward.
>
>
> Finally, on the transparency in hiring: this doesn't make any sense to
> me. Hiring is a private process. People send their private CVs, often in
> secret, from their current employers, to whom they are being "disloyal".
> People applying should not have visibility of their competitors for the
> job. In the case of Kartoza, they have a POPIA [2] (something like
> GDPR), which governs what personal information they can share.
>
>
> Tim has shared all of the documentation writer's CVs with Harrissou, and
> he can pick whoever he thinks is best for the job. Tim also gave some
> recommendations based on basic screening of GIS skills, technical
> writing skills, whether they submitted a writing sample etc. For the
> infrastructure developer position, they sent all the applicants a
> standard assignment as they do as part of their normal recruitment
> process and had their developers review and shortlist. I don't know how
> we could sensibly (stressing that part since QGIS.org is not Google and
> the like...) do anything differently. Here also, we are more than happy
> if others have better know-how to come up with constructive proposals on
> handling things if the budget items are approved.
>
>
> Please note that Kartoza would absorb the candidates they found or
> discontinue the hiring process if the budget was not approved.
>
>
> Another raised issue was that paid support people would demotivate
> volunteers: When we started with the paid bug fixing programme and other
> funded development, there was the same fear expressed; I think the
> success of those programs and the incredible amount of volunteer-driven
> contributions we are getting speak for themselves. We need to catch up
> on non-coders, as Jeff McKenna said (although out of a misread); we have
> been a bit stuck in the 2000s, where developers are the superstars.
> Currently, developers creating new shiny features are often getting much
> more [visibility|kudos|salary|...] in return, even though people "behind
> the scenes" writing documentation, translating stuff, triaging bugs,
> reviewing PRs, managing servers, keeping CI happy, ... are the actual
> superstars and should be treated as such.
>
>
> It is indicative to me that we, unfortunately, are still partly back in
> 2000 when I read comments like: "one of my takes is that seeing the
> grant budget disappear this year is a pity, especially seeing other
> amounts dedicated to documentation, for example.". The grant programme
> is indeed a fantastic program, and it is a shame to see it downsized,
> but our documentation and web infrastructure are also important. The
> work that happens in these areas is less visible and garners less
> attention. And yes, for once, we propose to downscale coding in favour
> of documentation. Hurra to that!
>
>
> Regarding the note on social dumping, I do not agree at all with that.
> We are offering a highly competitive salary in the market where the
> applicants live; this is a widely respected practice done by projects
> like Google Summer of code as well. A nice side effect is that we are
> starting to use funds in economies other than the usual "Rich" countries
> where probably 90-95% of our funds usually go.
>
>
> As for the budget always needing to be bigger, we run a world-leading
> software project for millions of people on a budget [apparently]
> equivalent to the price of 50 licenses of our main competitor. We (the
> whole QGIS community, not the PSC) are doing a pretty darn good job,
> thanks to the countless hours of passionate work put into it by
> volunteers and companies alike. We are far from perfect, we have a "get
> things done while respecting others" attitude, and we have to make
> compromises for efficiency. I'd never want to see any one of the members
> of our community having to stop working on the project due to feeling
> burnout from it.
>
>
> I hope I could address and answer most questions, and I encourage you to
> look at the open-source landscape around us and see how successful
> projects like KDE and Blender are doing the same thing as we propose
> doing here.
>
>
> So for those responding to this thread in a quick fly-by reply, I appeal
> to you to put some thought into why you object to this, who your
> objection affects, what advantage objecting brings to the project versus
> what benefit agreeing brings to the project, who's time and enthusiasm
> you value and whose you don't."
>
>
> As mentioned above, please join the PSC call starting soon if you wish
> to discuss this more.
>
>
> Cheers Marco
>
> [1]
> https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2022-November/065211.html <https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2022-November/065211.html>
>
> [2] https://popia.co.za/ <https://popia.co.za/>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Marco Bernasocchi
>
>
> QGIS.org Chair
>
> OPENGIS.ch CEO
>
> http://berna.io <http://berna.io>
>
>
>
>
> [1]
> https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2022-November/065211.html <https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2022-November/065211.html>
> [2] https://popia.co.za/ <https://popia.co.za/>
>
> On Mon, 5 Dec 2022 at 18:18, Enrico Ferreguti <enricofer at gmail.com
> <mailto:enricofer at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> > As for A, one of my take is that seeing the grant budget
> disappear this year is a pity, especially seeing other amounts
> dedicated to documentation for example.
>
> I agree with Vincent and Matteo and even if I understand the need of
> fund bugfixing and qt6 migration I would strongly recommend to
> improve grants budget as a consistent way to interact with
> community, furthermore I would enlarge core developers audience in
> any way with targeted training and social involvement and lowering
> the needed technical contribution skills. I thank you all for
> sharing this interesting discussion.
>
> Il giorno lun 5 dic 2022 alle ore 11:27 Vincent Picavet (ml) via
> QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> <mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> ha scritto:
>
> Hi Andreas, all,
>
> On 24/11/2022 16:09, Andreas Neumann wrote:
> [..]
> > We did not really discuss the hourly rates at the budget meeting.
> > From 2021 to 2022 we raised the hourly dev rates from 100 to
> 110 -
> > and the hourly documentation rates from 40 to 44. I know that
> both
> > rates are low. We can discuss raising them again.
>
> My question was general, and actually includes all prices. I
> have no definite opinion on this topic, as it can be complicated
> given the disparity of inflation according to what price we are
> talking about, and also geographically speaking.
>
> > The plan for the two positions was not to have direct
> employees of
> > QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG> <http://QGIS.ORG
> <http://QGIS.ORG>>, but to use a proxy company, in our case
> > Kartoza, to act as the employer. Also - our budget does not allow
> > regular European or North-American salaries. With these
> limitations
> > at hand, we can use Kartoza as a proxy to hire employees in
> certain
> > parts of the world where the salaries we can offer can be
> attractive
> > - and where they have talented people to work on some of our
> issues
> > (sysadmin, documentation, etc.)
>
> I have very mixed feelings about this, and it raises lots of
> questions we definitely have to clear out before establishing
> any process.
>
> - Using a proxy company is very similar to me than having direct
> employees, if these positions have no clear limits of time and
> perimeter
> - Using a proxy company instead of direct employees can be
> considered illegal according to local legislation. I do not know
> for Swiss law.
> - How was Kartoza selected ? Was there an open process for other
> companies to apply ? Who decided and on what criteria ? The fact
> that the company owned by a member of QGIS PSC is selected is a
> big red flag for me, if the process is not fully transparent and
> fair for others.
> - "our budget does not allow European or North-American
> salaries" : see below for the budget volume comments. But I have
> very mixed feelings about this statement : it sounds exactly
> like social dumping. I do not know what would be fair to select
> employees, and I recognize it to be a complex issue, but in some
> ways it does not feel right.
>
> > For the documentation part: Tim and Harrissou are involved in the
> > selection process of the candidates.
>
> Is the process and selection committee documented somewhere ?
>
> > I agree that the grant budget with 10k is not very attractive. We
> > also discussed skipping it for one year. Not sure what is
> better ...
> >
> > BTW: you can all help to find new sustaining members ... that
> would
> > increase our budget and would allow us to pay better hourly rates
> > ...
> >
> > I wish we had a larger budget at hand than the +/- 200k € we
> seem to
> > be able to attract each year. From certain countries where we
> know we
> > have a lot of QGIS users (France, Italy - just to name two of
> them)
> > there are not a lot of sustaining members or donations other than
> > from a few private persons and very small companies. Maybe
> companies
> > like yours could help us to get in touch with the larger
> companies
> > with a lot of QGIS users that could become new sustaining
> members ...
> > Do you think that would be possible?
>
> First of all, complaining that our budget is too low is
> definitely not the way to consider the problem : QGIS.org budget
> will, by definition, **always** be too low compared to what we
> could need. Developing a software and managing a community is a
> boundless task and you can always find tasks and work packages
> to spend all the money you can imagine of.
>
> I agree that QGIS.org could attract more sustaining members. I
> just hope you are not accusing Oslandia of not doing our job of
> proselitysm, QGIS community support, communication and globally
> QGIS.org and QGIS software contributions. We do our part for sure.
>
> ... And this is not the point, as I said the question I raise is
> not how to increase our budget, since the exact same issues will
> araise with a larger budget.
>
> The questions are :
> - A/ how do we use our existing budget for most important things
> to support
> - B/ what our decisions processes are, where are they
> documented, and are they clear, transparent and fair
>
> As for A, one of my take is that seeing the grant budget
> disappear this year is a pity, especially seeing other amounts
> dedicated to documentation for example.
>
> As for B, I consider that there is a lot of progress to do to
> make recent decisions and actions clean and trustworthy.
>
> Should we want to attract new sustaining members giving money to
> QGIS.org, we must have an exemplary behaviour in how we decide
> how to use this money.
>
> Vincent
>
>
> >
> > Andreas
> >
> > On Thu, 24 Nov 2022 at 15:05, Vincent Picavet (ml) via
> QGIS-Developer
> > <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> <mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
> > <mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> <mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>>> wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > Thanks for sharing the budget with the community.
> >
> > A few questions / remarks : - in most countries, we can see a
> general
> > inflation, having consequences on every kind of costs ( hosting,
> > salaries…). Did you take this context into account when
> preparing the
> > budget, especially when basing planned 2023 costs on actual 2022
> > costs ? - the cut on Grant budget is really hard. With a
> "reasonable"
> > mean budget of 5K per grant, this would mean 2 grants only
> this year.
> > It sounds more or less like the end of the grant program. Who
> would
> > candidate if chances to be selected are really low ? Wouldn't
> there
> > be a way to mitigate it a bit, through various smaller budget
> > reductions to other budget lines ? The increase in documentation
> > contribution is huge compared to the grant decrease. I fear
> that we
> > loose grants as a mean to attract new core developers.
> >
> > My most important remark is about "allow for a regular small
> salary
> > .. for one person on each item". Disclaimer : I am quite strongly
> > against QGIS.org having employees. If we are in the process
> of having
> > "regular workers" for qgis.org <http://qgis.org>
> <http://qgis.org <http://qgis.org>>, then we really have
> > to work hard on : - having a clear, written and transparent
> process
> > for how to select these people - .. process including a fair
> way for
> > anyone to candidate I may have missed some communications,
> but I have
> > not seen this in place up to now. This is definitely something we
> > have to put in place before having some internal troubles.
> >
> > Best regards, Vincent
> >
> > On 24/11/2022 12:07, Marco Bernasocchi wrote:
> >> Hi all, we prepared the QGIS budget for 2023 and would like to
> >> have feedback before submitting it to the voting members for
> >> approval. You can directly leave comments in the file [1].
> >>
> >> Please let us have any Feedback until December 4th. On december
> >> 7th we'll send the budget for vote.
> >>
> >> Cheers Marco
> >>
> >> [1]
> >>
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing>
> >>
> <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing>>
> >
> >>
> >
> <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing>
> >
> <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing>>>
> >
> >
> >
> >> -- Marco Bernasocchi
> >>
> >> QGIS.org Chair OPENGIS.ch CEO http://berna.io
> <http://berna.io> <http://berna.io <http://berna.io>>
> >> <http://berna.io <http://berna.io> <http://berna.io
> <http://berna.io>>>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________ Qgis-psc
> mailing
> >> list Qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org
> <mailto:Qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org>
> <mailto:Qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org <mailto:Qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org>>
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> >> <https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-psc
> <https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-psc>>
> >
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> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > -- Andreas Neumann QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG>
> <http://QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG>> board member
> > (treasurer)
>
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> --
> Marco Bernasocchi
>
> QGIS.org Chair
> OPENGIS.ch CEO
> http://berna.io <http://berna.io>
>
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