[OpenLayers-Dev] Spending Sponsorship Money

[pspencer at dmsolutions.ca]

I was having difficulty trying to respond to this thread, Schuyler has gone ahead and captured what I was thinking but finding hard to put into words!  

I don't think we should over-engineer this, or prematurely optimize it either.  I believe that we should bring this to a vote based on what Chris has put together, and if the PSC agrees then we execute the plan as it stands.  If potential sponsors come back and say the wording or objectives are too vague then we can adjust as necessary or encourage them to fund specific things directly through individual contractors.

I also believe that sponsorship through OSGeo is a good thing, although I don't know if the benefits outweigh the cost.  But it does feel like the right way to do things - avoiding OSGeo to keep a few extra bucks doesn't seem to be in the spirit of things.  I'm not educated enough to be strongly opinioned on this though.

Cheers

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: "Schuyler Erle" <schuyler at nocat.net>
Sent: Wednesday, November 5, 2008 7:41am
To: "John R. Frank" <john.frank at metacarta.com>
Cc: "OpenLayers-Dev" <dev at openlayers.org>
Subject: Re: [OpenLayers-Dev] Spending Sponsorship Money

On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 19:50 -0500, John R. Frank wrote:
>  I would like to see a list of the benefits that we hope 
> would come from spending money.  With such a list in place, the PSC should 
> vote on the various parts of it --- at least high-level categories if not 
> specific target benefits.  Ideally, this would result in a ranking of the 
> most important things that money could buy the project.

Unless I'm mistaken, we already have a list of benefits that we hope
would come from spending money. Quoting from the sponsorship doc that
crschmidt already prepared at
http://svn.openlayers.org/project/sponsorship/sponsoring:

"The possible tasks that such funding would achieve: 
  
 * Triage of bug reports, i.e. reproducing, then fixing or passing on to
   another developer a particular bug.
 * Extending the test suite for existing and new features to help
   improve library quality and prevent regressions.
 * Improving documentation to lower the bar to entry for the project.
 * General improvements to the software, especially as they meet the
needs
   of the wider OpenLayers community.
 * Funding participation in organized project activities, such as code
   sprints or other directed OpenLayers-improvement tasks.

"Sponsorship funds may also be used to contract for specific
improvements to
OpenLayers, to provision resources such as web hosting, or to support
project
promotion."

I'm really happy with this list as it already stands. Does anyone have
any qualms with it?

Basically -- Christopher, with all due respect, you were off to a really
strong start with this document, and I don't think you or anyone should
be discouraged by the discussion that has gone on around it. OpenLayers
owes its existence to MetaCarta's support, but MetaCarta is hardly the
only company out there that will support the project financially towards
the goals that have already been articulated.

What are we waiting for? ;)

SDE

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