[Qgis-psc] Certification and contributions

[Vincent Picavet (ml)]

Hello,

I am following the discussions made at the QGIS community meeting during
the SWOT session.

One of the subject we discussed is the link between certification and
contributions.

TL;DR : my point is that any organization willing to be recognized as a
certificating organization should prove that it actively contributes to
QGIS ( not financially ).

(very) long version below.

Our project is growing fast, and the amount of users now counts in
hundred of thousands and probably much more. But the amount of
developers and contributors does not increase by the same rate. This
leads to a lot of problems of quality of the product we are able to
deliver, as well as contributor's fatigue.

Moreover, there is a global, international penury of QGIS developers on
the market. Finding money for QGIS development is generally not a real
problem, but finding people to do the required job is much more difficult.

We also face a longstanding issue of tasks really difficult to fund
properly : bugfixing, bug triaging, packaging, documentation,
translation, plugin rewiev, PR reviews, infrastructure maintainance,
administrative work.. These tasks represent a huge amount of work, most
often done without financial support. We even have a real difficulty to
just know how much work it represent, and I do think we underevaluate it
by large scale factors.

Not only those tasks are difficult to fund, but they also can be
considered not fun, and it is therefore even harder to find contributors
to tackle them. This leading to being the same persons doing the same
ungrateful jobs again and again.

I think we have to work on these issues in order to :
- know the corresponding amount of work they represent by sharing the
information within the community and to the general public
- fund them better
- share the burden
- find (a lot of) new contributors

One opportunity we have here is the certification program. The way it
works is that we certify organizations, which are then allowed to issue
official QGIS.ORG training certificates. I think this is a good way to
handle the certification process : light enough and quite efficient.
It leads to the central question of "how do we decide which organization
should be certified ?". Once the bootstrapping period is over ( that's
now), I think we need to have a written process for that.

My proposal is the following (aka "it's not about the money" ):
- have a certification committee, composed of representative from
certified organizations and QGIS.ORG ( or the voting members )
- each organization willing to be certified has to file for it,
providing a document _proving that they actively contribute to the QGIS
project_ and also that they have experience in training
- the committee, based on the document, certifies the organization, or
postpone it, sending a detailed answer justifying the decision
- every 2 years, each organization has to re-file for certification

The main point is to ask for contribution, which would _not_ be money,
but can be :
- documentation efforts
- translation
- code contribution
- code review
- plugin review
- plugin releases
- efforts to maintain the QGIS infrastructure
- bug triaging, reproducing and clarifying bugs
- contributions to the administrative work of QGIS.ORG
- organize events ( community meetings, etc)
- any other contribution the organization can document

The goals are to :
- make people realize what the real work behind QGIS represents, and
realize its value in terms of efforts ( not only money)
- make it clear that what we need is contributors
- enlarge the community
- increase the quality of the abovementionned tasks
- make it a balanced deal : you want to be certified ? we need you to
contribute !

Of course, there will be organizations trying to workaround this system,
and there may be long discussions for cases when it is not easy to decide.
But this is the same we do for committers, and I do have confidence in a
committee from the community to be fair and trusted.
We need to have rules anyway to decide for which organization can be
certified, otherwise the certification itself will have no value. If we
have rules, let them be contributing rules !

And do not forget that we do not prevent organization from giving QGIS
training without contributing : it's just that if they want a
certification, they have to play the game with our rules.

I hope this long email is clear, and I would be glad to hear your
thought on this.

Best regards, long live QGIS !

Vincent Picavet

PS : posted to QGIS-PSC, should I copy to qgis-users ?