[OSGeo Oceania] [Oceania-Board] Sponsoring GDAL maintainer

Wed Mar 17 02:12:25 PDT 2021

This is a great initiative Dionne

As per Dionne's first email I would suggest we support a $500 donation from OSGeo Oceania in the first instance. This is simple and has immediate effect. I would hate for funding to be delayed whilst we decide on a funding methodology (Actually I think we should make it $1000)

Then we should look at other initiatives, as suggested by others , to provide some form of ongoing support, whether that be fund matching, sponsorship, or any other way to assist any of the FOSS4G projects (or OSM). I think the biggest issue with funding OS projects is the uncertainty of funding (as opposed to the actual amount) . I feel we should come up with a way to support a set amount of funding over a longer term (say 5 years) so it makes it easier to plan - I am sure there are some creative ways to do this.

G.
On 3/17/2021 6:36:22 PM, Dionne Hansen <dionne.hansen at gmail.com> wrote:
So are we thinking we match donations up to a certain amount using Tito in the short term, and then the long term plan is get donations from organisations. (Thanks for attaching that donation info, I had no idea!)
For the short term plan, is everyone happy with the $500 of OSGeo Oceania funds to match community donations up to that amount in Tito?

On Wed, 17 Mar 2021 at 18:31, Edoardo Neerhut <eneerhut at gmail.com [mailto:eneerhut at gmail.com]> wrote:

GDAL
Thanks for kicking this off Dionne. It's exactly the kind of initiative we should be supporting.
@Alex Leith [mailto:alexgleith at gmail.com] Tito seems perfect for this. Great idea.

Corporate sponsorships and donations
This is definitely something we should set up. OpenStreetMap US recently received an $80,000 donation from craigslist which I think indicates the level of interest in our community and the tools we support/enable. There are countless organisations using OS GIS and OpenStreetMap in our region who have the funds and willingness to support the community. Sounds like we should look at the legal options and then just set up something simple to begin with using PayPal, Stripe or similar.

[image.png]

On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 02:08, Alex Leith <alexgleith at gmail.com [mailto:alexgleith at gmail.com]> wrote:

I'm with John on this one, I'd like to kick some funds in too.

I wonder if a broader sponsorship drive, where OSGeo Oceania can 'sell' a kind of corporate support to orgs in Australia and pool funds is a good idea?

Let's keep this simple though. From a finance perspective, I can set up something in Tito, perhaps, where we can sell a 'pay what you want' and OSGeo Oceania could match, and we kick over a chunk of change to support GDAl development :-) 

Cheers,

On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 18:46, John Bryant <johnwbryant at gmail.com [mailto:johnwbryant at gmail.com]> wrote:

Great initiative, thanks Dionne!

I'm totally in support of anything we can do in this region to help make open source more sustainable. If OSGeo Oceania sets up a matching fund and helps identify productive ways to spend it (not just on GDAL, but perhaps on an array of important projects), I would like to contribute. I hope any business or org in the region that benefits from using open source would consider contributing.

The QGIS SIG was initiated to help with the procurement problem you mention, where many organisations can't make a "donation" but can justify spending on a "membership". We haven't kicked this off yet, but will soon. Hopefully there will be some useful lessons learned along the way.

Cheers
John

On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 15:11, Dionne Hansen <dionne.hansen at gmail.com [mailto:dionne.hansen at gmail.com]> wrote:

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 [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 [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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Alex Leith

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