[OpenLayers-Dev] Entering OSGeo Project Sponsorship

Fri Oct 17 02:32:39 EDT 2008

solid +1 from me on all this, chris.

my only thoughts at this point are:

1) management/infrastructure: what are the actual logisitics for getting
this money, dividing it up, allocating it? i would assume that osgeo has the
apparatus in place for the first part (taking it in, taking their 25%) but
then after that, how do we roll? are there any wierd tax issues with this?
will OpenLayers be making contributions to political parties?

2) having a "budget", even if it's not huge, I think adds a whole new
dimension to the responsibilities of the PSC. if this is something we want
to pursue seriously, i think it would be worth:

     2a) drawing up some formal guidelines for how this money is to be
spent: ie. votes by psc on propositions, etc

     2b) reconsidering the current composition of the PSC: I know this has
been discussed on the side a bit recently, but I think your comments in the
below emails are spot on and that companies who would like to be sponsors
will want some sort of semi-direct way of having their opinions voiced.
whether that is a direct seat on the PSC or some sort of wierd proxy, an
even and justified PSC is I think a prereq for going out and sellling this.
Notably, the creation of our PSC was made not on a whim but also certainly
not in a controlled laboratory setting*.

3) if it were up to me, any money that we could somehow bring in from
sponsors should be directly invested in "bunker" weeks, as we have been
having in the past. there seems no question in my mind that these have
always been super successful and very positive social events that open up
communications channels, turn out a bunch of code, and allow otherwise petty
developers like myself to feel something like important businesspeople, what
with the "gotta catch a flight", and the casual droppings of "my colleague"
to skeptical concierges and waitresses around town.

In the past, the way the bunkers have always worked is that we have a fixed
number of days, and everyone sort of shows up to the bunker with their own
agenda. Agendas can either be merged in the leadup to the event or in the
first few hours/day... but it seems at any rate a mostly democratic way of
doing things. When it's the case that your company is paying to send you to
a bunker, the message is clear that you should at the very least make an
effort to promote the ideas for projects your company would like to have
moved forward. I imagine it would be no different with sponsors: "Well Apple
has given us $38,000, I guess we should port OL to the iphone" or something
of that nature.

What I wanted to get at, though, is the difference between the bunker
approach and the direct subcontracting approach is that, especially in the
case where we're not talking about a big chunk of money... it is I think
pretty easy to spend the money on common things that would effortlessly
benefit all bunker-attending contributors -- and therefore the openlayers
project as a whole. things like renting office space or internet
connections. paying for lunch or even some sort of lodging subsidy. The idea
being that if it could somehow be split evenly over all attendees, well all
that might just simply translate to less headaches for the PSC in terms of
taking heated decisions on who gets what, which I can see as a potential
nastiness that at least I personally would rather avoid if possible.

Now, this is of course is assuming that when company x expresses interest to
sponsor us with HEAVY insinuations that this should be for "implementing the
blah control" or whatever, that desire should most certainly be taken into
consideration and hopefully carried out (either in bunker time, or if need
be via direct payment consulting).

it's now getting really late and I should be asleep. so if any of the above
doesn't make sense, you'll have to forgive me. I haven't yet gone through
and installed my MailGoggles[1] yet :-)

* Most glarlingly, the fact that I happened to be the original "chair" of
this committee seems almost pulled out of a hat, and that I remain in office
now some 2.5 years later more a testament to social grace (or disorganized
mutiny) than any sort of reflection of my knowledge, coding style, ideas
about the future, or even my occasional, presumptive, 3/4-hearted attempts
at "managing".

[1]
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Christopher Schmidt <
crschmidt at metacarta.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 08:47:51PM +0200, Kristian Thy wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 12, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> > > I hesitate to provide sponsors direct control over the usage of funds.
> > > The reason for this is simply that I would prefer to not be 'beholden'
> > > to the sponsors for how we use funds directly.
> >
> > Organizations with specific needs can still pay developers consulting
> > fees to fix their problems.
>
> Sure.
>
> > Indeed, short of having money in surplus and no specific needs (i.e. for
> > reasons of altruism) I fail to see why I, as a corporation, would give
> > money through OSGeo instead of just paying someone to scratch my itch
> > directly (you know how just rubbing your back through your t-shirt is
> > never quite satisfactory?).
>
> Scratching specific itches is beneficial for when you have a specific
> itch. However, the success of OpenLayers as a project can achieve more
> than that: things that you would have never thought that you'd need
> scratched might get done. Things like better memory management, better
> speed (fewer CPU cycles), improved documentation all allow for the
> project as a whole to succeed in ways that few specific organizations
> have a strong individual desire for, but a more general fund might build
> up enough support for that they get priority.
>
> Additionally, although there are a large number of OpenLayers
> consultants of all shapes and sizes, the number of people who are core
> developers in the project is relatively small. With funds being managed
> by the project directly, those developers are likely to play a key role
> in the design and implementation of plans that are paid for by
> sponsorship funds -- and that kind of difference can make the difference
> between a great patch for you and a great patch for the project. (I've
> seen enough good designs come out of the OpenLayers development team
> that I'd generally say that stuff which is worked on by the core
> developers will always be of a relatively high quality compared to
> individual contributors.) Since most of the core contributors to the
> project work for organizations where their consulting time is unlikely
> to be something you can get ahold of trivially, giving money to the
> project directly might have a more direct correlation on improvement of
> the project.
>
> Another thing is that there are many organizations which based a fair
> amount of their success upon the success of the OpenLayers project. For
> example, the Ordnance Survey Open Space project depends critically on
> OpenLayers, since a large part of their product is simply OpenLayers
> with some additional configuration wrapped up into it. With that being
> the case, though OSOS doesn't have any specific needs from the OL
> project (or at least, we aren't aware of them), they still depend on
> openLayers continuing to succeed as a project -- supporting new browsers
> as they come out, improving upon things which might be bugs, etc.
> Organizations like this may not have any specific itch to scratch, but
> also don't have the resources to replace OpenLayers should the project
> fail, so it may be in their best interests to support the project
> monetarily to ensure continued community success.
>
> By acting as a sponsor, organizations also get to use this fact in their
> marketing materials. In the same way that purchasing a sponsorship slot
> at a conference gets your name and logo in a prominent place in
> conference materials, purchasing a sponsorship for OpenLayers gets your
> name and logo in what may be a prominent place on our website/in our
> marketing materials. It means that people can recognize that your
> organization directly supports the OpenLayers project. to some extent,
> some of MetaCarta's efforts in OpenLayers as a contributor to the
> project can be seen as a marketing cost: a full one third of the search
> results for MetaCarta on Google are tied directly to the OpenLayers
> project. (32,100 out of 102,000) When I meet people at a conference, the
> thing I usually hear isn't "MetaCarta... you guys are the search engine
> company, right?" It's "MetaCarta: You guys do OpenLayers!" Sponsorship
> allows for organizations which don't have the same level of developer
> resources to get the same kind of participation in a project that they
> support.
>
> Lastly, I expect that any sponsors will get more control over future
> direction of the project via their feedback than people who aren't
> directly suppoting the project. Certainly, my current answer to most
> questions about "When will feature $x be done?" Are "When you write a
> patch for it." However, given sponsorship, I think that there is a
> chance that features that a large enough number of sponsors are in favor
> of to be given priority -- and if developers still aren't interested, we
> have cash that might be able to be thrown at the project. And In the
> same way that I'm more likely to spend time helping someone who has
> demonstrated the ability to help themselves -- by patching code,
> offering documentation, or simply contributing to the mailing list --
> I expect there is a certain level of credit you get for being a project
> sponsor that will indirectly improve the communications you get from
> developers when you have questions.
>
> In conclusion, (hm, 5th grade essay time!) Sponsorship offers a number of
> benefits to the sponsor in a more indirect way than scratching an itch.
> By collaborating with other sponsors, tasks which are too large for one
> organization to support directly can be undertaken and core developers are
> more likely to be involved in developments. Sponsoring helps ensure
> the success of the project as a whole -- impotant for organizations
> which depend critically on OpenLayers. Sponsoring has a certain
> marketing appeal, and can help to popularize supporters of the
> OpenLayers project even if they can't contribute developmetn resources
> directly, and sponsorship helps to allow for the determination of future
> direction by providing a direct pipeline to the project steering
> committee for sponsors to offer project direction feedback.
>
> All in all, for many organizations these benefits are probably worth the
> $3k that they get out of it. In fact, many organizations sponsor OSGeo
> with far fewer reasons. OSGeo sponsorship does not get you any direct
> control/benefit from any OSGeo project -- just your name on a web page/
> marketing materials. But there are a number of OSGeo sponsors:
> http://www.osgeo.org/content/sponsorship/sponsors.html who do it
> primarily for the encouragement/maintainance of the OSGeo community.
> Some might well simply describe this as 'altruism', but I think that if
> you were to ask Frank Warmardam, what he would say is that you are
> ensuring the future stability of a community of developers who have
> helped you in the past. Combined with a little bit of altruism, such
> things can go a long way :)
>
> > That said, Chris, I still think it's good idea, and I have probably
> > overlooked something that makes it more attractive. Edumacate me :)
>
> I don't know if I did so successfully, but i've just laid out the pitch
> I plan to use on people who I want to be sponsors, if the PSC decides to
> go this route: I'd love to hear whether you (or anyone else) thinks the
> above reasons are convincing :)
>
> Regards,
> --
> Christopher Schmidt
> MetaCarta
> _______________________________________________
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> Dev at openlayers.org
> http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>
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