[OSGeo-Board] Budget. Eat this.

[Jo Walsh]

dear all, 

I recently met a bloke with a Web2.0 startup plan called
"argumentarium.com", through which people would pay to have structured, 
well reasoned, conclusive arguments with access to a knowledge base of
supporting cases and prior art. I boggled at the idea that some people
might consider this a leisure activity; but it would be a useful
professional service in a context where the back-and-forth,
dialectical nature of email can make it harder to move forward ;)

I'd like to respond to as much of this thread as I can, though I see
several connected discussions in it; the one about the feasibility and
goal-directedness of the budget brainstorm in the bright light of
hindsight; the one about the 'innate quality' of a Foundation bringing
together so many different kinds of people with different ideals; and
the one about how non-profit enterprises manage social capital. 
  
Arnulf wrote:
> >By setting up a half million budget for the first year we 
> >change the character of the Foundation a lot and go business right away. 

Frank wrote: 
> I have a vague sense that we can achieve something like an order
> of magnitude larger impact on the geospatial field over the next
> half a decade by getting better organized and pushing in more
> professional ways.

Arnulf, I enjoyed your "open source is not anti-commercial" rant at
the ORA people. Business doesn't have to be anti-social. Large sums of
money can be very divisive; but having an open decision process, lots
of healthy oversight, and keeping focused on providing clear benefits 
to members and projects, will help a lot. Most OSGeo members will be
getting "added value" to their business indirectly through the geospatial 
domain growing, and open source software's role in it growing, and
that provides a good return on volunteer investment.    

> >* To provide resources for foundation projects - infrastructure, funding
> >(Fundraising), legal, ... - $60,000

My sense is this is way more than OSGeo will need in the first year.
This begs a bigger question of "what infrastructure is it valuable to
projects to support?" With Frank's blessing I asked this question on
the flossfoundations list, and got a few useful responses. I didn't
realise it had closed archives, but one of us could re-post the
feedback somewhere useful (SAC? WebCom? :))
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/private/foundations/

Sysadmin is one of the easiest things to get on a volunteer basis,
because it's so "deliverable"; but someone needs to accept calls at
3am now and then, and be "front-line" for peoples' complaints. 
I think half-time-person is overkill. But this is an area in which it
would be good to have a contingency / emergency fund.
  
> >* To operate an annual OSGeo Conference, possibly in cooperation with
> >related efforts (e.g. EOGEO) - $100,000
> >
> >I believe that the annual conference should finance itself. 
> First, the $100k is a working fund for the conference, and once raised
> should be replentished from the conference once it is complete.
+1. 

> >* To make foundation and related software more accessible to end users -
> >binary "stack" builds, cross package documentation, etc. - $50,000
> >
> >Yes, but what for? I am sure to be able to get together $50,000 for one 
> >year all by myself from clients that I am in contact with and who need a 
> >binary stack. It would be problem-driven and not product-planned.
> The goal of this money was to provide a seed for binary stack building
> activity.

This also contains LiveCD/custom distribution projects in my mind;
this all will need some UI+tutorial development. This is likely to be
one of the easiest things to get direct sponsorship for. And could be
hugely valuable in terms of getting OSGeo software into the hands of
people and institutions who would never otherwise get to use it.

> >We would need a channel that we can stuff the money in - and that could 
> >well be OSGeo. But do we need to fix a budget that we have to reach 
> >until we really know that somebody is going to pay for it? 
> I think it is clear that we the board need to see how successful fundraising
> is before starting too many activities so as to not outstrip our ability
> to raise money.  But that aside, it is hard to try and raise money without
> some reasonable description of what we want it for.  I see the budget
> as much as a "visioning exercise" as it is about a concrete spending plan.

Nod, this is a kind of benchmark for what is needed and why, to be
able to offer to potential sponsors. It's a guideline to 'devolve'
activities to different committees, so they're not working in a vacuum 
("you're considering splashing out 60k/350k, are you delusional?")
And I appreciate Gary's strategy in the meeting, of overspeccing
rather than underspeccing the budget, because FunCom is unlikely to
raise *more* than it sets out to...

> >* Promote the use of open source software in the geospatial industry
> >(not just foundation software)- $133,000
 
> I'm not exactly sure if this amount was the executive director
> amount or the budget for VisCom promotion (boths, trade shows, travel,
> etc).

This is one area in which I think we overshot; ambivalent about the
real value in big splashes at professional tradeshows or trade
conferences; ambivalent about the real value of "advertising". 
But VisCom are the experts, and maybe Autodesk can tell us better.

> That said, I am a cheapskate, and would prefer to see us take a
> relatively cheap approach to promotion with substantial amounts of
> money spent only when we feel it is especially critical.  I'm pretty
> keen on having an executive director (but not eager to grow "staff"
> beyond that); but even on that front I would prefer to see the salary
> and benefits be enough for the person to be comfortable, but not so
> high as to appear like a windfall to the community.  In essence I would
> prefer to have an executive director working for a bit less than they
> might be able to get in the private sector to demonstrate that they are
> in it for the cause, not just the money.

In "cultural work" (or any enterprises which are people- rather than
profit- centered) there is what my friend Saul Albert calls a "guilt
economy". People are predictably working below their true value,
because they have a strong vocation for what they do. For a non-profit
to state "you have to accept less, because you're doing this for love 
and not for money" can come across as exploitation tending quickly to
burnout, and provides no guarantee of the right 'values'. 

If we-the-OSGeo-board were to hire someone who *didn't* have the broad
respect of the community, whose every public action did not reflect
their dedication to collective gain above personal gain, then we
would be failing in our responsibility to the community. 

The ED position is a potentially life-eating role with ongoing and
unending responsibility. It also has some future-insecurity unless, as
Allan notes, we are careful to sustain funding for it in advance. 
There's so much that it would be good to have a dedicated, fulltime 
person to keep on track, and if the ED could manage FunCom activity then
it could easily be self-sustaining. (but not on a commission basis!) 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Executive_Director would be a good
place to start. I pasted in a little bit of this conversation there.

> >Can we hammer down somewhere that the 'main decision body' of OSGeo must 
> >not (is not allowed to) ever spend more than 5% of their 
> >OSGeo-brainpower thinking about how to fund the next year? I will fight 
> >for this.

Fighting talk, eh? This is unsisterly of you, 7of9. :)

> Clearly the rest of the board needs to consider how they feel about this
> too.

Nod, I would look forward to hearing Dave's commentary in particular
as I guess he has more experience than many of us with this sort of thing?  

hopes for the best,


jo