[mapguide-internals] RE: Project Sponsorship

[Jason Birch]

I'd prefer to work out the details before going to vote; two votes  will just slow down the process.
 
Looking at the GDAL and OpenLayers examples, I believe that there are quite a few differences in what we could feasibly apply the funds toward at this point, primarily because of our developer/user mix.  However, some of the important tenets (PSC directs the use of funds, sponsors get full reporting on use of funds and feedback through annual questionairres, etc) feel right to me.  I also think that we should have a mechanism for sponsorship funds to be earmarked for specific PSC-approved projects, assuming that at some point we find developers within the community interested in undertaking this kind of work.
 
Apart from the necessary infrastructure for continuous builds and installer packaging, why do we need sponsorship, goals and specifics?  I've got some thoughts, but I'd like to hear from everyone.
 
Goals:
 - Increase the level of community participation in the MapGuide development process
 - Enhance the quality of the project's communications (announcements, tickets, release transparency, etc)
 - Ensure that project is approachable by new users, especially in the areas of documentation, code samples, initial install experience, etc.
 
Potential uses (examples only, actual PSC-approved expenditures may differ):
 - Maintain project-specific infrastructure necessary to support a fully open development environment -- OSGeo takes care of things like Trac, SVN, and downloads very well for us, but seems to be under-resourced for supporting a continuous build framework, especially for projects such as ours which require strong Windows support.
 - Partial funding for a portal manager, ensuring that tickets are followed up, email issues are referred to the Trac system where appropriate, new releases are tagged with best possible information on date, etc.
 - Creation and maintenance of MapGuide installers/packages for a wider range of operating systems
 
I'm sure there is much more, and maybe some of these aren't in sync with everyone's thinking.  There is also some thought to be given to what sponsors can expect from this, other than higher quality software and community recognition.
 
Please let post to the group with your items, etc.  Clearly separate goals from potential uses, and ensure that the uses can be tied back to specific goals.  Once we get a bit of cohesiveness, this should all go in a wiki for collaborative editing.
 
For reference:
 
http://www.gdal.org/sponsorship.html
http://openlayers.org/sponsorship/
 
Jason
 
________________________________

From: Paul Spencer
Sent: Sat 2008-11-22 8:31 AM
Subject: Re: [mapguide-internals] RE: Project Sponsorship

I'm also in favour of this.  The OpenLayers team has just finished a 
lengthy discussion on sponsorship and has developed some guidelines of 
how the sponsorship stuff will work for them (largely based on the 
GDAL experience and example).  I think we will need to develop a 
similar set of guidelines for sponsorship for MGOS and have the 
community and the PSC discuss it before we can formally go that route, 
but the PSC could vote to agree (or not) on sponsorship in general 
with the details to be decided on later by a second vote.