[Qgis-developer] Discussion on the QGIS grant proposals

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi Andreas,
thanks again for raising these important points.
My notes (also personal opinion, not to be intended as a PSC position)
below:

Il 22/09/2016 08:14, Neumann, Andreas ha scritto:

> ------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Now comes my personal position/opinion - note that this is not the
> official opinion of the QGIS.ORG board.
> 
> I would personally welcome, if this round of the QGIS grants program
> could focus on the QGIS 3.0 release.

Agreed, a critical point for QGIS future.

> I personally also think that the QGIS grants program, at least at the
> current time, should not pay for development of new features (at least
> not features visible in the GUI for the users). These features can
> be "relatively easy" funded by companies and government organizations
> out there. So our limited QGIS.ORG funds should be rather spent a) to
> community work or b) infrastructure work or c) development work in the
> core of QGIS, such as API modifications, code redesign - stuff that
> isn't really visible to the users, but essential for the success of the
> project.

Agreed, that's one of the reasons we started this program.

> Documentation and PyQT documentation work is already budgeted in our
> annual budget. The money for 2016 hasn't even been spent for both items.
> So I think we should first use the budgeted money for such work. I think
> that user and developer documentation should be an ongoing effort and
> should be supported every year, und budgeted every year as such. We can
> increase the documentation budget positions next year, should it be
> necessary. In reality, it was more a lack of people willing to do the
> work, rather than a lack of funding. So, I am happy to see some
> proposals around documentation and developer documentation - so it seems
> that we have some volunteers. I just suggest that we consider
> documentation work separately and do it anyway - regardless of the
> outcome of the voting on these items.

It makes sense to me.

> Several proposals have a very limited local focus, only useful to one
> single country, or a very limited subset of our users. I suggest that
> such proposals could best be financed by local user groups or interest
> groups. It can't be the purpose of the QGIS grants program to finance
> such projects.

Fully agreed.

One other important point: the reason I originally proposed the grant
programme was to recognize the huge volunteer work several people are
donating to the project, and to help keeping their motivation high.

My suggestion is therefore to prioritize the projects by the people you
feel/know have contributed most to the project until now.

All the best.

-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS & PostGIS courses: http://www.faunalia.eu/training.html