[QGIS-Developer] [Qgis-psc] QGIS budget 2023 RFC

Mon Dec 5 09:17:54 PST 2022

> As for A, one of my take is that seeing the grant budget disappear this
year is a pity, especially seeing other amounts dedicated to documentation
for example.

I agree with Vincent and Matteo and even if I understand the need of fund
bugfixing and qt6 migration I would strongly recommend to improve grants
budget as a consistent way to interact with community, furthermore I would
enlarge core developers audience in any way with targeted training and
social involvement and lowering the needed technical contribution skills. I
thank you all for sharing this interesting discussion.

Il giorno lun 5 dic 2022 alle ore 11:27 Vincent Picavet (ml) via
QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> ha scritto:

> Hi Andreas, all,
>
> On 24/11/2022 16:09, Andreas Neumann wrote:
> [..]
> > We did not really discuss the hourly rates at the budget meeting.
> > From 2021 to 2022 we raised the hourly dev rates from 100 to 110 -
> > and the hourly documentation rates from 40 to 44. I know that both
> > rates are low. We can discuss raising them again.
>
> My question was general, and actually includes all prices. I have no
> definite opinion on this topic, as it can be complicated given the
> disparity of inflation according to what price we are talking about, and
> also geographically speaking.
>
> > The plan for the two positions was not to have direct employees of
> > QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG>, but to use a proxy company, in our case
> > Kartoza, to act as the employer. Also - our budget does not allow
> > regular European or North-American salaries. With these limitations
> > at hand, we can use Kartoza as a proxy to hire employees in certain
> > parts of the world where the salaries we can offer can be attractive
> > - and where they have talented people to work on some of our issues
> > (sysadmin, documentation, etc.)
>
> I have very mixed feelings about this, and it raises lots of questions we
> definitely have to clear out before establishing any process.
>
> - Using a proxy company is very similar to me than having direct
> employees, if these positions have no clear limits of time and perimeter
> - Using a proxy company instead of direct employees can be considered
> illegal according to local legislation. I do not know for Swiss law.
> - How was Kartoza selected ? Was there an open process for other companies
> to apply ? Who decided and on what criteria ? The fact that the company
> owned by a member of QGIS PSC is selected is a big red flag for me, if the
> process is not fully transparent and fair for others.
> - "our budget does not allow European or North-American salaries" : see
> below for the budget volume comments. But I have very mixed feelings about
> this statement : it sounds exactly like social dumping. I do not know what
> would be fair to select employees, and I recognize it to be a complex
> issue, but in some ways it does not feel right.
>
> > For the documentation part: Tim and Harrissou are involved in the
> > selection process of the candidates.
>
> Is the process and selection committee documented somewhere ?
>
> > I agree that the grant budget with 10k is not very attractive. We
> > also discussed skipping it for one year. Not sure what is better ...
> >
> > BTW: you can all help to find new sustaining members ... that would
> > increase our budget and would allow us to pay better hourly rates
> > ...
> >
> > I wish we had a larger budget at hand than the +/- 200k € we seem to
> > be able to attract each year. From certain countries where we know we
> > have a lot of QGIS users (France, Italy - just to name two of them)
> > there are not a lot of sustaining members or donations other than
> > from a few private persons and very small companies. Maybe companies
> > like yours could help us to get in touch with the larger companies
> > with a lot of QGIS users that could become new sustaining members ...
> > Do you think that would be possible?
>
> First of all, complaining that our budget is too low is definitely not the
> way to consider the problem : QGIS.org budget will, by definition,
> **always** be too low compared to what we could need. Developing a software
> and managing a community is a boundless task and you can always find tasks
> and work packages to spend all the money you can imagine of.
>
> I agree that QGIS.org could attract more sustaining members. I just hope
> you are not accusing Oslandia of not doing our job of proselitysm, QGIS
> community support, communication and globally QGIS.org and QGIS software
> contributions. We do our part for sure.
>
> ... And this is not the point, as I said the question I raise is not how
> to increase our budget, since the exact same issues will araise with a
> larger budget.
>
> The questions are :
> - A/ how do we use our existing budget for most important things to support
> - B/ what our decisions processes are, where are they documented, and are
> they clear, transparent and fair
>
> As for A, one of my take is that seeing the grant budget disappear this
> year is a pity, especially seeing other amounts dedicated to documentation
> for example.
>
> As for B, I consider that there is a lot of progress to do to make recent
> decisions and actions clean and trustworthy.
>
> Should we want to attract new sustaining members giving money to QGIS.org,
> we must have an exemplary behaviour in how we decide how to use this money.
>
> Vincent
>
>
> >
> > Andreas
> >
> > On Thu, 24 Nov 2022 at 15:05, Vincent Picavet (ml) via QGIS-Developer
> > <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> > <mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > Thanks for sharing the budget with the community.
> >
> > A few questions / remarks : - in most countries, we can see a general
> > inflation, having consequences on every kind of costs ( hosting,
> > salaries…). Did you take this context into account when preparing the
> > budget, especially when basing planned 2023 costs on actual 2022
> > costs ? - the cut on Grant budget is really hard. With a "reasonable"
> > mean budget of 5K per grant, this would mean 2 grants only this year.
> > It sounds more or less like the end of the grant program. Who would
> > candidate if chances to be selected are really low ? Wouldn't there
> > be a way to mitigate it a bit, through various smaller budget
> > reductions to other budget lines ? The increase in documentation
> > contribution is huge compared to the grant decrease. I fear that we
> > loose grants as a mean to attract new core developers.
> >
> > My most important remark is about "allow for a regular small salary
> > .. for one person on each item". Disclaimer : I am quite strongly
> > against QGIS.org having employees. If we are in the process of having
> > "regular workers" for qgis.org <http://qgis.org>, then we really have
> > to work hard on : - having a clear, written and transparent process
> > for how to select these people - .. process including a fair way for
> > anyone to candidate I may have missed some communications, but I have
> > not seen this in place up to now. This is definitely something we
> > have to put in place before having some internal troubles.
> >
> > Best regards, Vincent
> >
> > On 24/11/2022 12:07, Marco Bernasocchi wrote:
> >> Hi all, we prepared the QGIS budget for 2023 and would like to
> >> have feedback before submitting it to the voting members for
> >> approval. You can directly leave comments in the file [1].
> >>
> >> Please let us have any Feedback until December 4th. On december
> >> 7th we'll send the budget for vote.
> >>
> >> Cheers Marco
> >>
> >> [1]
> >>
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing
> >> <
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing
> >
> >
> >>
> > <
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing
> > <
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WyoZCKOehNhU5YB4pFPOuiJbie1mUmMPiq8YW7qyez0/edit?usp=sharing
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >> -- Marco Bernasocchi
> >>
> >> QGIS.org Chair OPENGIS.ch CEO http://berna.io <http://berna.io>
> >> <http://berna.io <http://berna.io>>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________ Qgis-psc mailing
> >> list Qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org <mailto:Qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org>
> >> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-psc
> >> <https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-psc>
> >
> > _______________________________________________ QGIS-Developer
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> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > -- Andreas Neumann QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG> board member
> > (treasurer)
>
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