[OSGeo Oceania] Sponsoring GDAL maintainer

[Dionne Hansen]

Hello OSGeo Oceania,
I'm addressing this to the board, the OSGeo oceania members and to the
wider community. It has come to my attention that  a message sent on the
goal-dev mailing list here:
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2021-January/053302.html - which
highlights a problem with burnout among the GDAL maintainers and outlines
the difficulties of maintaining a tool like GDAL when one is only paid for
developing new features but not for maintaining the project, responding to
the mailing list, bug fixing, or new releases.

That message further outlines ways of overcoming the problem of burning out
the project maintainers. Including getting more people to participate and
providing a revenue stream so that a maintainer only has to do the
maintenance job.

Even Rouault (the current maintainer of the project with over 19,838
commits) put up a call for sponsorship (https://github.com/sponsors/rouault)
for his activities maintaining and improving GDAL and PROJ. He is also a
developer of QGIS, MapServer, libtiff, libgeotiff, and cpenjpeg.

I feel that OSGeo Oceania should be doing our part to help with revenue
streams to safeguard the maintainer against overloading and burnout.

1) As a stop gap effort I propose that we donate $500 to Even for
maintenance purposes.

2) I think we should discuss if we can help in any other capacity - ie.
amplify the need to donate money to projects like these, matching donated
amounts up to a certain limit?

3) Discuss the barriers that our respective organisations have to donating
maintenance funds to these projects. Ie. my employer could not sponsor via
GitHub without breaking procurement rules. Is there anything that OSGeo
Oceania can do to make maintenance sponsorship easier?

I'd appreciate a discussion about what we can do to help in the near and
long term and I will set up a loomio thread for the $500.

Thanks,
Dionne Hansen
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