[mapguide-internals] Biggest bang for Sponsorhship buck

[Trevor Wekel]

Hello PSC,

I have been thinking about our languishing Sponsorship program.  I believe concrete messaging around how we intend to use the funding may be helpful.  From our PSC meeting a little while ago, build automation was not a high priority.  Builds on demand were considered to be more prudent since we need a changing code base to build in the first place.  With that in mind, how does this sound for a usage formula?  It combines some infrastructure for building manually on demand with a funding formula for bug fixing:

$1500 USD per year for hosting and maintaining build infrastructure.  VPN access to and occasional backup of the VMs are required.

$0 for performing the builds.  Executing and monitoring the builds will be a community effort.  No automation will be performed.

Funding for implementing bug fixes in response to tickets logged by our user base and nominated by the PSC.  The PSC should maintain a page on the Trac website with the tickets we need fixed and an estimate of the cost to fix.  This will provide transparency into the use of funding and give project developers cost targets.  Payouts exceeding the estimated cost to fix should be justified by discussion on mapguide-internals.  Estimation is never perfect and MapGuide is very complicated.

Costs should be estimated using a "biggest bang for the buck" rate of $50 USD/hour.  The maximum payout for a single bug fix should be limited to $1000.  Payment will be made through PayPal on an intermittent basis (to be discussed with OSGeo finance).

I am sure there are lots of holes and issues with the above formula.  Hopefully it will generate some discussion.

Regards,
Trevor