[postgis-users] [postgis-devel] Vote On Project Sponsorship

[Nordgren, Bryce]

-----Original Message-----
From: postgis-users-bounces at postgis.refractions.net [mailto:postgis-users-bounces at postgis.refractions.net] On Behalf Of Mark Cave-Ayland
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2011 10:49 AM
To: postgis-users at postgis.refractions.net
Subject: Re: [postgis-users] [postgis-devel] Vote On Project Sponsorship

On 02/09/11 21:36, Paragon Corporation wrote:

> 1) I'm a bit pessimistic we would garner enough funds to fund a 
> particular feature.
> So lets just not go there.  It's talking about stuff that may never 
> happen And those things may best be dealt with between two individuals 
> if we can't come to an agreement.
> ...
> I do not see this as a free money, but more as a simple answer to 
> people when they ask "If I want to fund the project, who do I give 
> money too?"
>
> This is an extremely frustrating question to not be able to answer and 
> I don't think any of us would Feel comfortable saying "Give it to me 
> directly"

I agree that while assigning financial resource to development tasks is going to be tricky and require quite a bit of time, I do like the idea of things like sponsorship for travel to code sprints (hey - I'm in
Europe!) and also some funding some kind of build infrastructure. For example, I think it would be useful to fund Win32 and Win64 cloud instances so that I can help Regina with the Windows builds when she gets stuck.



Orthodox build machines for all the supported platforms: +1 (not that I count).

In terms of "accepting money", I think that people wanting to fund something specific may (read WILL) want the community to supply the best person for the task at hand. So figure it out even if it's hard. Clearly there are some things which are general, but everyone has their own speciality. A raster related task should cause a different personnel assignment than a topology related task, for instance. It also should provide a central mechanism for managing feature enhancement requests accompanied with $$$: part of the process should be to get the PMC to sign off on a proposed approach before work starts, giving the customer some degree of assurance that the final result has been peer reviewed and will be carried forward with the main codebase. And of course, reviewing the design needs to be reimbursed. Clearly, translating a feature enhancement into a design and a realistic level of effort should also be a community, consensus-based activity.

Even if the users want to pick an item off of a "menu" (such as the list of features on the WKTraster page), it's not exactly obvious who is free and who isn't or even who can be hired and who can't (e.g., are the university folks for hire, or are they wrapped up by supporting their own projects?) "Directed funds" like this are going to require more accountability than generic donations to a common pool. Some identifiable organization needs to be responsible for delivering on the promise, and this organization needs to represent the community as a whole rather than an individual or an isolated company. Conversely, they need to be able to tap any of the current members of the community or bring on outside help for the duration. The psychological difference between having the community take on the task and the customer willy nilly hiring some totally unrelated person to do a one-off job is quite large.

Also, note that if you do develop the capability of handling directed funds, you also have the capability of handling undirected funds. Developing a "menu" of needed tasks / desired features not only gives potential customers a way to put their money where their mouth is, it also gives the community a list of items to which undesignated funds may be applied.  I would suspect, however, that the boring gruntwork should receive the bulk of the undirected funds, while the flashy shiny hi-vis tasks should be accomplished on directed funds.

Bryce