[Qgis-psc] Developer roles

[Nyall Dawson]

Vincent - snipping out the 99% of your email I agree with -- don't
take my comments below as meaning I disagree with the bulk of your
reply! :)

On Fri, 26 Jun 2020 at 18:56, Vincent Picavet (ml)
<vincent.ml at oslandia.com> wrote:

> I tend to disagree here, because I consider that growing the community and
> onboarding new developers has much more value in the long run, than having a
> code developped 20% faster.

Honestly, in the case of the current crop of "core developers", I
think 20% is a huge disservice to their skills. I'd honestly,
conservatively, estimate that a developer who already has intimate
knowledge of the QGIS codebase, Qt, GDAL etc will be at a minimum 10x
faster than a new contributor to the project. I don't think anyone
could ever argue that we only get 20% more value from funding Even's
time vs someone completely new to the project! (Try 20k% more value,
and you're in the right ballpark...)

> I would personnaly like to see the grant program as an onboarding program. But
> this is not a strong request, and maybe we could have another program dedicated
> especially to onboarding new developers ?

I disagree - I think given the current round of high quality
submissions it's clear that even when we restrict the program to
established contributors there's more high value work vs funds
available. If we divert some of these grant funds to onboard new
contributors then it's definitely going to be at the cost of the
high-priority submissions we already receive.

But regarding a dedicated program -- isn't GSOC ideal for this? That's
exactly what it's oriented to, and doesn't cost us anything...!

> > Fully agree, we should have the same thing for a "non-coding" contributor
> > (think Richard, Harrisou, Giovanni ...) which do an amazing job for QGIS as a
> > project but don't express it in C++
>
> +1

I'm also +1, but I think we should separate the terms explicitly here.
I would like to see the "developer endorsed by QGIS" title as a
reflection of their **coding** talents, and something which can be
used on a CV/resume as a reflection of their development skills. The
"endorsed, high value" community contributor title should be used for
non-developer contributors only, and have it's own set of guidelines
for eligibility.

Nyall