[Board] Budget: GSoC money

[Daniel Morissette]

On 13-04-02 4:12 PM, Anne Ghisla wrote:
>
> I understand that a lively and successful project like QGIS deserves
> OSGeo's recognition - but I'd stick to 1000 USD (~780 EUR) for this
> event, for the following reasons:
>
> - the code sprint focuses on a single OSGeo project (a popular and
>    successful one, but OSGeo financements are primarily intended to
>    multi-project events);
> - QGIS budget is pretty healthy and the event would happen even with
>    less OSGeo funding;
> - QGIS holds usually two major events per year, and several other local
>    ones. QGIS code sprint co-financements at 1500 USD each for 2013 could
>    sum up to 3000 USD, around a third of the global OSGeo code sprint
>    fund.
>

I did not realize that QGIS was holding two sprints per year when I 
wrote my previous email. QGIS is a very active project and definitely a 
driver for OSGeo so I'm very supportive of this sprint, but there should 
definitely not be an expectation that we will fund every QGIS sprints at 
the height of 1500$ as that would not be fair to our 20+ other projects 
that we also want to support.

Thinking about this some more, we may be better to go with a lower 
number such as 1000$ as suggested, especially for a single-project 
sprint. It's really a tough call as we do not have a clear idea of all 
the requests that we'll get over the year, and not all sprints do 
request funding even if they could, for instance last week's Boston 
sprint did not request funding and was able to run on 100% sponsors 
funding (with ~28 participants from about half a dozen projects).

I'm not saying that we should not support the QGIS sprint, just that we 
need to find a way to be fair/supportive to all projects within the 
limits of our budget and that's not an easy task.

What do others think?


> I hope that other OSGeo projects will follow QGIS in requesting
> co-financement, and more cross-project events will take place.
>

Same here.

-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/
Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000