[Qgis-developer] Sponsoring Development

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Andrew

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Andrew Chapman
<andrew.chapman at donkagen.co.uk> wrote:
> Sorry - this is a long post!
> This discussion so far has focused primarily on the QGIS developers'
> viewpoint, but I think it may be worth considering the situation from the
> perspective of those with the money. There seem to be (at least) four major
> groups that could help, each with their own agendas/motivators.
> 1) National and governmental. These organisations potentially have access to
> very large amounts of money with decisions being driven (probably) by a mix
> of political agenda and perceived national benefit. I think money from this
> group (if gained) would be in relatively large amounts (in the UK, projects
> would be unlikely to be less than £10k and could lead to much larger
> amounts), with quite broad targets and little or no day to day overseeing.
> To get such money I think we need to have increased use of GIS seen as
> important to national success and QGIS perceived as the best solution to
> support. Not only do we want to encourage use of QGIS directly but also we
> need to publicise it wherever possible and try to get it added to government
> software lists.
> 2) Medium to large organisations. These organisations typically will have a
> specific and (hopefully) well-defined requirement and would see the
> developers as external consultants. The solution could possibly be at two
> levels with QGIS consultants helping deliver overall solutions that have
> additional work sub-contracted within the developer group.
> Typically, before any formal quote is requested, someone would be asked for
> an order of magnitude estimate of likely cost and timescales. I've spent
> decades on both sides of this fence working as a consultant and managing a
> variety of sub-contract projects - if someone cannot quickly answer the
> basic questions at this stage (availability of competent people, range of
> daily rates, complexity and risk/uncertainty, very rough estimate of likely
> effort required) then the project dies at birth.
> The next stage would be a formal specification and quotation phase, neither
> of which should be overly complex. If there is a lot of uncertainty, I've
> usually run a small pre-project to remove the uncertainty and reduce
> development risks.
> 3) Small organisations and individual users. These people generally have
> little money... but there are lots of them. The main voluntary payments that
> they make are to charities so, while not going as far as suggesting that
> QGIS become a registered charity, could we try to convince people to make
> small regular payments? 1,000 people giving £50 each on average per year
> would pay for a useful amount of bug fixing etc.
> 4) Current and potential developers. Developers put a lot of their time and
> often personal money into QGIS. The easier it is for new developers to
> contribute, the more everyone benefits. Can we make it easier for potential
> new developers to get started? Could we have an OSGeo4 type of installer to
> create a working development environment for plugins and/or trunk?
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Group (1) needs marketing effort. Pete Wells, Saber Razmjooei (both Faunalia
> UK) and I have been doing this in the UK with Ordnance Survey, national and
> local government for about three months and progress is looking promising.
> Group (2) is also part of our marketing, but there is a clear problem in
> that even the first "order of magnitude cost" question would be difficult to
> answer... although in reality I would come up with a number based on what I
> know of QGIS and lots of years making educated guesses.
> Group (3) we could have gentle encouragement to make payments... but it must
> be easy! My experience making a donation for hackfest was that it was hard
> work and has resulted in a rash of Italian spam. We would need foolproof way
> to make local currency payments including by cheque.
> And finally, don't forget the documentation. User manuals and tutorials are
> as much part of "selling" QGIS to users as its functionality.
> Andrew Chapman
>

I wrote some thoughts on funding here:

http://linfiniti.com/2011/06/some-thoughts-on-the-future-of-qgis/

It would be really nice to find some benefactor to sponsor the project
as a whole for the unglamarous stuff as mentioned in the above
article) too.

Regards

Tim

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Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
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