[Qgis-psc] How many releases in 2018?

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi, 

Thanks all for your feedback. 

If I raise the expenses somewhere or introduce new expenses, I need to
decrease other expenses. Otherwise it would be an unbalanced budget,
which I would like to avoid. I'd like to be more conservative - as this
helps us to have a healthy financial situation. 

I have now changed the proposal to spend less on bug fixing for version
3.4 and included expenses for packaging (9k - not sure if this is
reasonable ?) It would mean 3k per release - (2k per release for Jürgen
(for Windows and Debian Nightlies) and 1k for Larry for OSX). Does it
make sense? @Jürgen: would these 6k for your work in 2018 be a
reasonable compensation for what you do regarding OSGeo4W, etc.? There
is now already 6k more spending than expected income - and I am not
willing to go beyond ;-) 

I know we have a financial reserve of about 45k EUR - but I'd like to
keep this reserve in order to be able to react for unforeseen things.
Who knows if our non-profit status is really accepted? It could mean
that suddenly we have to spend several k EUR on taxes - or we decide
that we need new/faster/better infrastructure. Or suddenly more devs ask
for financial support to attend the dev meeting. 

About raising the bronze level sponsorship: not sure if this wouldn't be
a shot in the foot. We have a lot of very small companies (1-3
employees) as sponsors. 500k is probably what they can afford, but if we
raise it now, we risk loosing them. Besides, companies are free to
choose the amount they want to spend, anyway. We have some sponsors who
pay 800 or 1500 for a bronze sponsorship. So that option already exists.
I would like to keep the sponsorship prices as they are for now - and
rather make sure to ship a good version 3. If the 3x releases are really
good, it would be a compelling argument to attract new sponsors ... or
ask some existing sponsors to raise their level or amount a bit. 

@Anita: the expenses for the QGIS 3 bug fixing will be taken into
account this December. I expect invoices for around 20-30k EUR regarding
QGIS bug fixing of QGIS master (3.0). 

About SWAG: yes, we could buy T-Shirts for the Madeira meeting. Who
wants to organize it? Otherwise I am not such a big fan of useless
advertising gadgets ... 

Greetings,
Andreas 

On 2017-12-11 09:02, Paolo Cavallini wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Il 10/12/2017 20:35, Tim Sutton ha scritto: 
> 
>> Other suggested budget items:
>> Package maintenance - Windows
>> Package maintenance - Mac
>> Package maintenance - Linux / Debian / Ubuntu
>> 
>> Rationale: I think it would be good to pay something towards all the
>> effort it takes Jürgen in particular puts into making the packages, and
>> in future also support Larry to maintain 'first class' MacOS packages.
> 
> +1 from me
> 
>> Expected income: Should there not be.a 'balance brought forward' with
>> any projected remaining cash from 2017 shown as an income for 2018? If
>> we did that there would surely be an extra n thousand available for our
>> activities.
> 
> it makes sense to me
> 
>> I 100% agree about the PR management that we could as one of the devs to
>> take on as a part time 'job'. I would like to also propose that because
>> there is such a long backlog of items in the queue that we have a
>> special sprint from that person (e.g. 1 week of funding) to triage the
>> existing queue (as a separate activity to reviewing the regularly
>> incoming PR's).
> 
> +1
> 
>> Our SWAG budget underspend: Can I suggest we actually do use it - I
>> think it is a wasted opportunity to market our project. Perhaps we could
>> start by buying a bunch of t-shirts / caps etc and brining them along to
>> Madeira and just handing them out to all attendees - a small reward for
>> the effort they put into supporting the project? I can probably do it
>> from here if nobody else is interested to help with it.
> 
> the more nerdish side of me says we better move this budget to bugfixing
> etc., but from a wider perspective I agree with Tim, so a +1
> 
>> Glad to see you added in more cash for the Python API docs....and for docs
>> in general.
>> 
>> I also want to suggest that with cash brought forward from 2017 if we
>> have additional cash that we take the first steps to hiring a develop on
>> a e.g. one day a week basis to do 'work in the interests of the project'
>> - thinking for example of the welcome screen / user experience stuff we
>> discussed in Nødebo and other high value effort which does not fit
>> neatly into a grant and which contractor work would generally not
>> attract. It would add EUR41,600 to our budget but I think we could ask
>> the developer for a cheaper rate since it is long term guaranteed work.
>> I think we could couple this with a funding drive and updating our
>> sponsorship prices a bit e.g. move bronze up to EUR 800 or 100EUR.
> again, +1
> 
> Thanks Tim for your thoughts, and Andreas for your precious work!
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