[postgis-devel] Vote On Project Sponsorship

[Chris Hodgson]

The actual money is handled by OSGeo for us, which is great. But we do 
need to have well documented votes on where and how to allocate the 
money. This is the part that seems a bit worrisome to me, as well - 
being that some of the most likely ways to spend the money would be to 
fund some of ourselves to do work that we might have otherwise done for 
"free". Additionally, it seems like there is some possibility for 
contention on how the funds should be spent, I think we might need some 
policy written up about how we come up with ways to spend the money and 
how we decide who does the work. We would end up needing to deal with 
contract management as well - what rates do we set? How do we make sure 
that the work will get done to the standard we are looking for? How do 
we keep track of where the "free" works ends and the "payed" work stops, 
and vice versa. We can't even assign a single contract manager from 
among us, as any one of us might be on the other end of the contract.

While on one hand it seems silly to complain about having to manage what 
is essentially "free money", but on the other hand I also know the 
resentment that can build in a community (or family even) from doing 
business between members.

Here's the sort of decisions I worry about:

- what to spend money on
- who should do it
- how much it is worth
- what about the work that other people will end up doing to support  it 
(building a new release, testing bugs around the issue, documenting)
- who will scrutinize the work and what authority do they have (how big 
does a bug have to be in order for us to hold back payment)
- how will people feel when they do a bunch of work for free, and then a 
donation comes in and somebody else gets paid to do something they view 
as less important or not done to as high a standard

While "free money" sounds great, I think there are some risks to our 
community, and also some additional costs to be borne by the PSC. I'd 
like to give others the chance to assuage my fears but for now my vote 
is +0.

Chris

Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> On 01/09/11 23:16, Paragon Corporation wrote:
>
>> I think we are coming close to having completed our work to become a
>> full fledged OSGeo project and I would like to request the OSGeo board
>> to add us to the project sponsorship
>> board.
>> Can we have a vote on this.
>> +1
>> Thanks,
>> Regina
>
> I understand that this means we can get external sponsorship (which is 
> a good thing) but how do we manage the transfer of funds to 
> developers? Do we need to have a treasurer of some description?
>
>
> ATB,
>
> Mark.
>