[OpenLayers-Dev] Entering OSGeo Project Sponsorship

Fri Oct 17 17:48:50 EDT 2008

Great responses to my midnight blab. Thx for taking the time to address it
all,
chris. Instead of picking at this line by line, I'll just try to summarize a
response here.
(more blab)

So first of all, the link to the Project Sponsorship page on the OSGeo wiki
is great -- I
probably should have looked at that more before writing anything. Alas...
:-)

But so one thing you mention in here is the GDL/OGR experience. Is there
some
documenation about that somewhere or is it more just firsthand knowledge. I
think that
knowing more about how this sponsorship deal has actually worked out for
other projects
would be a huge help to informing us as we put our feet into it. Any
informal observations
or links to more official documentation would be appreciated.

Overall, it seems like the main tension between our points of vista here are
centered
around the notion that sponsors would somehow be hijacking the
direction/focus of
development activities for the project.

Although I think you know that I would resolutely agree with you about this
in principle,
it's not something I'm nearly as ardent about defending... so it's great
that you wrote this,
that there's someone out there clearly voicing this important issue.

Whereas I definitely agree, again, "in principle", I think that this is
maybe some grey
territoire here and that before making a public move with this, it would be
good to sort it
out.

The deal being that when I try to put myself in the shoes of Joe the Plumber
^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
Sponsor, I unfortunately just don't think they will universally understand
this vibe. In an ideal
world, they all would and we could merrily go on about our business, but I
just think that the
typical "sponsor" will be more of the mindset "I give you money... what do I
get out of it".
And even if we clearly explain to them the idea is just a general warm
feeling of "supporting
the project" combined with the logo/marketing buzz.... I think they'll still
at least *feel* like
maybe they have some sort of implicit vote or weight in terms of project
direction.

...and now that I've written all that out, I'm not even really sure exactly
whether I have any
sort of a solution to that or not... just that it seems like something we
should be attuned to
and that if there were some way to somehow mitigate this factor, it might be
worth looking
into. if others have opinions/experience, please chime in.

One thing that I saw on that wiki for the Project Sponsorship thing chez
OSGeo is the
"Earmarked Sponsorships" [1]. Maybe there is someway that this could be a
sort of intermediary
happy ground in between these extremes. What I would really like is
something like this but
on the other side... like instead of PSC suggesting special projects looking
for money, it would
be companies suggesting special projects and offerring money.

I realize that your answer to this is "if a company wants something done,
they should pay
someone to do it" but I think we can look at the last 2.5 years and clearly
see that that is
*not* happenning. The only way that patches are getting into trunk is when a
PSC member
is interested in the patch (or someone out there makes a whole whole whole
lot of noise about it).

So again, I'm not saying "let's sell our souls to the highest bidder", all
I'm saying is that maybe
it would make sense to help out companies that find themselves in this
situation but don't seem
to be able to connect the dots to make this happen. Remembering, afterall,
that the whole idea
here is getting ideas and work out into the open so that we don't have 5
people doing the same
thing (and especially if they  are all *paying* to do it :-P)

Another issue you bring up is the ideas for how to *spend* the [theoretical]
money. I suggest
prioritizing it for bunkers, whereas I *think* you are saying it would be
better spent by funding
people to do more administrative-type work for the project like bug tracking
or email list question
fielding or something of that nature. ("better" is maybe not what you're
saying but at least the idea
that it is something to be considered equally with the bunkers).

And again, I think I agree with this in theory, I'm just curious as to how
the actual implementation
of this would work out. I guess it all really boils down to how much
theoretical money we are
really talking about. If we were to somehow get like 10 gold sponsors for
the project, then ya
ABSOLUTELY it is time to start funding someone to be the bug man or the
users@ list man (or
woman, sorry). But if we're talking about $3,000 or somewhere more in that
neighborhood, we're
talking about something like $50-100 a week there... which I think is hardly
enough to pay anyone
to be actually productive in an administrative/maintenance role. Let alone
the idea that anyone
would even be *interested* in it, jeje. :-)

But seriously, my suggestion re the bunker thing was much more a sort of
"easiest road to dog
food" thing than necessarily a studied analysis of the
problem/opportunities. If it's as easy as just
dumping it into a bunker fund, that would be nice. Having to take decisions
on who and how and
where and when wrt the admin stuff.... although it may be very valuable...
does imply more work
on our (PSC) part.

The final issue here is the PSC, and we seem to be in agreement. My only
point there is that I think
that if sponsors are going to be donating their money "to the project" (as
you argue), essentially
putting full faith in the PSC to take good care of it, then I think we need
to take another look at our
PSC and make sure it's even and fair enough that people who maybe aren't so
familiar with the
(stable, diligent) history of the PSC would be more (objectively)
comfortable with it.

Oh and one more thing, re my suggestion for "guidelines" as to how to spend
the money, which you
seemed sort of vehemently opposed to. I didn't mean to suggest implying like
rules for connecting
donations to actual work... all I really meant was adding a line or two to
the PSC page on the wiki
or something like that with just some general rules about how we spend
money. Really the only
thing I had in mind was like a bullet point clearly explaining the decision
process (vote, majority,
unanimous, days to wait, etc) and maybe another bullet enumerating the
different types of things
that we'd consider spending money on.

Also keep in mind that one of the responsibilities is:

"To produce a detailed annual report of activities based on the sponsorship
funding to be posted
on the web site, and for distribution to sponsors. "

...so there is another overhead that is added to the project. Would we
nominate someone from the
PSC to be in charge of this? Worth documenting.

My whole issue with this whole thing is just that adding money into the mix
I think always tends
to complicate things. Even though I know we already *have* companies
essentially giving us
money in the form of allowing us time to work on openlayers... i just think
that when it's actually
real money people will act in different ways.

One more thing that was just brought up in discussion is how are we going to
balance out the
recognition given to paying sponsors versus companies that simply donate
developer time? I'm
thinking specifically of MetaCarta, OpenGeo, Camptocamp, etc. These are all
companies making
huge investments in the project and yet getting no overt (logo, etc)
recognition. If I were one of
them I would feel that somewhat unfair.

sorry for more unstructured blab,
e

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Project_Sponsorship#Earmarked_Sponsorships

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 9:15 AM, Schuyler Erle <schuyler at nocat.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 07:22 -0400, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
>
> > I have seen no cases I'm aware of where the PSC has completely ignored
> > a
> > request, or even, generally speaking, acted against the will of the
> > project, so at this time it seems likely there is a fair amount of
> > trust in the PSC. Fixing that, if there is not, is an important part
> > of
> > the process for gaining sponsors.
>
> I agree. I think we have a strong record of achieving consensus as per
> the project bylaws. We might appoint a treasurer from within the PSC
> just to be the go-to person for receiving and disbursing the funds
> according to PSC direction, but I think that should be about it for
> starters.
>
> > Your tenure as PSC chair is a testament to your continued ability to
> > hold the project together better than anyone else could, as far as I'm
> > concerned, stretching from your ability to chat for hours on the phone
> > about the various issues related to a release, to the ability to step up
> > as release manager, to your consensus driven comunication style, which
> > has worked out perfectly for the 'chairman of the board' position that
> > you hold. Given my druthers, I personally wouldn't have it any other way
> > if I had to start all over.
>
> +1 on all counts!
>
> SDE
>
>
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