[Qgis-psc] How many releases in 2018?

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi, 

I again modified the 2018 budget and took out the 3.6 release, which is
very unlikely to happen. 

The reasoning is as follows: 

if 3.0 is released end of January (which is on the optimistic side, a
more realistic month is probably february 2018), then 3.2 would probably
be released in May or June and 3.4 probably in September or October. 3.6
is very unlikely to happen in 2018. 

I assigned more resources to 3.4 bug fixing and made sure the budget is
a bit better balanced with the expected income side. Please note that
the 3.0 bug fixing is still primarily handled by the 2017 budget. Work
is currently ongoing - see
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F6v4g8Ayb3wIt73rxFKD8h4B95MaTwt-eDit8YvReB0/edit#gid=1356139814
 

About using some of the reserve funds: we can still do that, but lets
plan not to use the funds until we find it would be really
benefitial/useful to the project to use them. 

Andreas 

On 2017-12-11 09:40, Andreas Neumann wrote:

> 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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