[Board] 2009 budget

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

On Sun, November 16, 2008 01:20, Howard Butler wrote:
> All,

Howard,
it took me some time to work this one out and now it is too long a mail
yet again...

> After reviewing the draft 2009 budget
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Budget_2009
> that was proposed and discussed at the AGM, I would like to add my noise to
> the discussion.  First, a few observations:
>
> - More than 50% of our budget is Executive Director ( salary + travel
> + office ).
> - 7.5% of our proposed budget is computing services to our members
> (hosting, server, etc)
> - The accounting line seems a bit high to me for a ~200k operation,
> but our operational costs seem reasonable. - Assuming all of our other
> costs are fixed (ED, corporate operations, computing service), our
> discretionary funding (minus 1% for a server) seems to be in the marketing
> category  (22%).
>
> The marketing budget http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Marketing_Budget_2009
> is not fleshed out at all.

This is true but there has been a lot of dicussion on this during the IRC
meetings on the mailing list and f2f in Cape Town.

> I think we should have a discussion about
> whether or not marketing OSGeo really represents a return on investment to
> members, member projects and to sponsors.  If this discussion already
> happened, could someone provide a synopsis of the main benefits of putting
> this much marketing muscle behind OSGeo? What are the targets of the
> marketing and can they be hit?

There is a pretty clear understanding in the Marketing Committee of why
this money is needed and who should be addressed but not how exactly it
will be spent. Writing this down as a management abstract should be high
up on the Marketing Committee agenda. Besides this it should be clear that
50k for marketing is minuscule compared to what our "proprietary
competitors" spend. It is actually near to nothing if we really try to be
a global organization.

> Marketing doesn't write software, it doesn't improve documentation,
> and it doesn't streamline project communication.

>From a short term perspective this is true. But from a long term strategic
point of view marketing is the foremost important issue for OSGeo. If we
want to attract people who write code and improve documentation we need to
make sure that they can make a living doing it. OSGeo will not pay them
directly for a loadful of reasons starting with globally highly disparate
wages and ending with cultural differences. To be able to make a living
writing code many people need to *use* the software. To make people use
OSGeo software we first need to connect to them and this is all what
marketing is about. It is the most efficiently streamlined one way
communication anhd ideally it results in two way communication for the
interested people. Additionally it opens up the space for commercial
activities. This helps to write code and improve documentation which what
you are asking for. So yes, marketing does all that you want and it is
scalable.

> I think spending most of
> our discretionary resources on it

First off - we do not really have any discretionary resources to spend
unless we manage to attract more sponsors. This means that the budget for
Marketing will only be spent if it is there. For Marketing this is OK
because it is not vital - for system administration this would be a much
bigger problem. The other way round - I feel a lot more at ease with an
emergency administration than having to pay for CollabNet every year
again. Remember that discussion?

> makes our sometimes dicey value
> proposition even tougher to potential sponsors... "um, pay us money so we
> can make ourselves more visible so we can get more people to pay us
> money."

Hehe, if this is our proposition we will not get anywhere. Conceded.

> Does the marketing effort exist to sustain OSGeo?

Yes it definitely does, but in a slightly more subtle way by growing the
outer rim of Open Source users. If you look at OSGeo there is an inner
ring of a few dozen who do the grunt work required to run the foundation,
that is Ed, the board and all officers. Another set of inner rings is
formed by the developers. Each of these groups is self sufficient and
suffers from despising marketing as a dirty job for non-hackers (loosers
like Paul or me (sorry Paul)). But in their brighter moments they see the
need for it to be done and forgive Paul for blogging and building
communities more than coding on GEOS.

> I guess I've
> always had a bit of a problem with the marketing aspect of OSGeo,
> especially when its not at all clear to me who we're marketing to other
> than the general GIS ether and for what purpose. IMO, the people using
> Open Source software are the ones who market it,
> not the people who make the software.  Could the OSGeo marketing proponents
> please set me straight on how I see this all wrong?  How is marketing a
> benefit to OSGeo's members, and not just OSGeo the entity?

You might not remember but I was a fierce opponent of the emerging
foundation because I knew that it would mean a ton of work. More than
that: a withering, floundering and crappy foundation would hurt Us All a
lot more than not having one at all. Since then we try to do whatever it
takes to make it a good and respectable foundation and so far it seems
that it worked out just fine.

I cannot follow the bit with "OSGeo as an entity"? You will need to
explain this to me. During inception of the foundation there was a
discussion whether we should start big and with a big bang or more slowly
and then grow. I guess we chose the second path and from all that I can
see we have prevented fairly well from growing an unmanageable overhead.
But this might be up for discussion again any time.

> Where I'm going with this is in my (biased) opinion, SAC is hurting
> for resources.

This is an important point but an altogether different topic! I would
suggest that you felsh out the list below and identify what resources SAC
is hurting for most. Then we can look into whether we need to do more
marketing to lure people into voluntarily providing those resources or
whether we need to pay for it with OSGeo funds (that we need to acquire
yet).

What I would dearly want to avoid is to cannibalize another committee's
hard worked for ideas. People are doing a really good job in SAC but there
is others doing the same in Marketing.

> We are starting to approach the exhaustion point for
> volunteer administration for a number of tasks (as witnessed by tickets
> sent to SAC that are never acted upon), and we are starting to approach
> the saturation point for hardware resources like the heavily- overloaded
> download.osgeo.org (the "server" item in the budget plans to address
> this).  Our Peer1 resources need to be balanced out to provide better
> utilization, and that will require quite a bit of effort.  I personally
> would like to see us investing some experimental efforts into virtual
> (cloud-like) operations similar to AWS, whether
> via OSL, or virtualization at TelaScience, or other.  Hardware management
> is a headache, and if it can be avoided all the better. I would like SAC
> to be able to draw upon some paid manpower to help with some of the
> stickier tasks that have continued to be pushed off, like fixing up our
> single-signon/LDAP.  As time approaches infinity, tasks like these will
> get done voluntarily, but paid manpower would shrink down that timeline
> and allow us to provide better service.
>
> SAC is a major service wing of OSGeo.  If we provide bad service,
> projects will walk, and we'll loose one of the great collective benefits
> that OSGeo provides.

Is this an issue? If it is we must explicitly address it immediately and
need to know what problems exist. Maybe I am badly informed but from all
that I can tell there has only been the on and off complaint of a machine
going down due to overload by crawlers, search engines and full disks. If
there is any such problem please let me nkow immediately - communication
is the most important point here. If I have not been listening intently
enough I appologize. On the other hand OSGeo is growing so big that I am
having trouble following all lists, so please feel free to directly
letting me know of such problems. Further down the road when people have
accustomed themselves to always getting cool, fast service and profund
knowledge from SAC we will have to live with this kind of complaint
anyway. But I did not know that we hit that point already.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

> No amount of marketing gets us out of that
> predicament.  For the board, the questions to ask are where to invest our
> limited resources and when.  SAC will continue to limp along, but the more
> we do that the more we risk having projects leave or not simply not
> participate.  With a flat budget, SAC will continue to limp.
>
> If there is generally support for providing more resources to SAC, I
> will come up with a budget proposal of what will likely be required.
>
> Howard


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