[Qgis-user] put a reward on the head of the whishlist tasks

[G. Allegri]

Hello list.
In these days, reading the various whishes in the past thread [1], I
was wondering about the various "business strategies" to speed up and
give more robust support to QGIS development. I don't know if the way
of putting a reward on the head of a certain target has been discussed
before, anyway I want to share some thoughts.
It could be considered in a two-way meaning:

 - an user (single o corporative) needs a certain
tool/utility/feature/etc: he describes it and put a reward on it. It
becomes an open task to which anyone can contribute, also providing
more foundings (a way to gather sparse needs)

 - a qgis developer is able to develop a certain tool, or to solve a
bug, make an improvement, etc., but he needs money (not everything can
be done on free time!). He puts an expected reward on his work.
Maybe/probably there can be users that would find its work very useful
and could contribute to its founding.

In both cases the reward could be distinguished between development
reward and short-term/long-term support founding.
I'm not referring only to software dev but documentation, diffusion
supports, etc., too.

Obviously it would need the design of an efficient, effective and
transparent founds management design, and a system to submit a
"contract" with the parts involved.
The complexity of such a system could be managed involving the local
actors that offer QGIS support, both in the development offer and the
requests gathering, but with a shared common system. I don't introduce
the idea of a commercial brand/trademark because it's critical under
many aspects, but we could reproduce something similar to guarantee on
the quality of this system and of the products...

I'm considering to apply the idea to other cases other then QGIS,
because I find that it can encourage potential founders, realizing a
direct relationship between them and the developers through a
concrete, focused, task. Besides it doesn't contrast with the
traditional polling system, and the core development choices leaded by
the developers team and invoked by the community. While the latter
remains the foundamental, voluntary based, QGIS development approach,
my proposal could be part of a parallel, more structured, commercial
system...

What do you think about this? Could it be something feasable and
useful for QGIS?

Cheers,
giovanni

PS: I'm sorry for my english but I hope I've been able to explain the
basics of my idea!
[1] http://n2.nabble.com/Ideas-for-QGIS-plugin--td2240074.html