[Qgis-psc] Budgeting 'unattractive' work via grants and PSC (was again about the bug tracker)

[Tim Sutton]

Hi All

Just a couple of meta-thoughts on the funding side:

In terms of ad-hoc funding support from the PSC, each year the PSC develops a budget proposal which is approved in the general meeting. You can check in with Andreas when the next budget is due to come out, but it is simple enough to raise a request for ‘infrastructure’ work to be included in the budget. We have done this in the past for documentation, sysadmin etc. cost items and there is no reason why additional infrastructure items can’t be added there, nothing irregular about that from my point of view. So my suggestion is figure out how much you need for the migration of the issue tracker (and maybe also try to get a regular annual maintenance amount added to the budget) and then ask Andreas if it can be included the budget proposal for the general meeting.

IIRC (Andreas can correct me if I am wrong) there is also a budget for some ad-hoc costs but I think it would not be enough to cover the migration. Changing the budget (for larger items) in mid-cycle should also be easy enough to do with a simple community vote and I suspect there would be no resistance for a request for budget for issue tracker migration. 


With regards to the grant programme: I generally like the features we get from the grant programme, but if other’s don’t like the approach, simply raise a motion to change it e.g. we could do themed grant programmes like ‘2019 we invite proposals relating to improvements of our QA and Testing infrastructure’, or request specific wording to be added to indicate which types of proposals may be submitted.

My point really here is that you should not see the budget and grant programme as a constraint but rather as a resource and I am sure the PSC would favourably support (through the above mechanisms) any reasonable request to find money for important infrastructure work, improve the grant process etc.

Rock on guys!

Regards

Tim


> On 12 Oct 2018, at 01:41, Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>> 
>> The latter is clearly the reason. And I do think this is the limit of
>> our current grant application program. It works well to decide for new
>> features, but not for ground-level, hard, not shiny but necessary work.
>> This has been seen multiple times with latest call for grant
>> applications. I can understand it from a user point of view, but I do
>> think this is the role of QGIS.Org to find a way to mitigate this.
>> Funding features is not hard, while funding "uninteresting" but
>> necessary work is. Bugfixing, bug triaging, PR Review, documentation,
>> infrastructure... My opinion is that QGIS.Org should concentrate on
>> these topics.
>> This is not the main issue here though.
> 
> Can I request that this topic be split out into its own conversation?
> You've clearly got concerns with the current grant process, so let's
> not let the discussion about bug tracker/code repo get locked up with
> this other discussion too. (Heck, it's complex/sensitive enough as it
> is!).
> 
> Nyall

 




---

Tim Sutton
tim at qgis.org




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