[Qgis-psc] [QGIS-Developer] QGIS budget 2023 RFC

Jeff McKenna jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com
Thu Nov 24 10:41:50 PST 2022


Hi Andreas,

I strongly applaud the idea to have a budgeted salary for those 2 core 
positions: server maintenance and documentation.

As the person who fills those roles in another community, to manage the 
mapserver.org server and keep all of its OGC services online constantly, 
plus manage the documentation, and from someone working trying to make a 
living at this in the private sector, I am also strongly shocked and 
disappointed to see any difference between a server maintainer hourly 
rate and a documentation person's hourly rate.

That makes me feel like we're back in year 2000 again (where 
documentation contributors for FOSS4G projects, who often are the very 
first to have to read the source code, tickets, and email threads to try 
to clearly relay to users how to use a feature) and where the term 
'devs' or 'developers' were not used for the documentation team.

Fast forward to today, where we are now all treated as developers, on 
the same team, and all very appreciated, and where we can all now get 
that core developer rate that you mentioned.

So again, kudos to QGIS.ORG for proposing such paid positions, but 
please please make sure to pay all contributors the same amount of 
hourly rate.

Thank-you,

-jeff


-- 
Jeff McKenna
GatewayGeo: Developers of MS4W, MapServer Consulting and Training
co-founder of FOSS4G
http://gatewaygeo.com/



On 2022-11-24 11:09 a.m., Andreas Neumann wrote:
> Hi Vincent,
> 
> Thank you for joining the discussion.
> 
> 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.
> 
> The plan for the two positions was not to have direct employees of 
> 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.)
> 
> For the documentation part: Tim and Harrissou are involved in the 
> selection process of the candidates.
> 
> 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?
> 
> 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>> 
> 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>, 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>>
>      >
>      >  -- Marco Bernasocchi
>      >
>      > QGIS.org Chair OPENGIS.ch CEO http://berna.io <http://berna.io>
>     <http://berna.io <http://berna.io>>
>      >
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> 
> -- 
> 
> --
> Andreas Neumann
> QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG> board member (treasurer)
> 
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