On Sep 17, 2014 9:17 AM, "Bastien Nocera" <hadess hadess net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 13:58 +0200, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 09:51:15AM +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:
> > > The approach to budgeting is similar in that the Foundation and Google
> > > both have a budget, but our budgets are quite different. Any spending
> > > in any area means that that money cannot be spent in another area.
> >
> > What if the Foundation decides to just organize OPW, which is already a
> > good contribution, but doesn't sponsor itself interns? By doing that,
> > the saving permits to spend the $10k or $5k on something else, like
> > sponsoring an experienced member of the Foundation instead of sponsoring
> > newcomers.
> >
> > For example when a Friends of Gnome campaign (like for the accessibility
> > or security) is finished, the Gnome Foundation could add $5k to it.
>
> What exactly do you hope to achieve by saving $5k?
>
> One of the problems for the Friends Of GNOME campaigns is that we have
> trouble finding interested parties to work so cheaply to implement the
> goals we set out. When I was on the board, I put together 2 call of bids
> for those campaigns, and I constantly heard from consultancies that the
> amount was so low that the only reason that they would be interested in
> it was to help GNOME. I doubt that the amount is significant enough to
> pay the people necessary to achieve the goals we set out.
>
> GSoC mentoring and OPW are much better value for money. They introduce
> people to Free Software development, to a community. Some of the alumni
> stay in the community, like yourself, some go into other branches of
> Free Software, or activism related to technology.
>
> Even if we said that those $5k were incredibly important, what would you
> do with them? We haven't had cases where hackfests were cancelled due to
> lack of funding and adding $5k to a FoG campaign kind of misses the
> point (we pay for our own campaign?) to add to an amount that's not
> enough to achieve the goals we set out when consultancies are paid
> market rate.
>
> It's all a false economy.
>
It should be noted that hackfests do distribute the funds to more experienced devs. GNOME needs to service both ends. Feed the top of the funnel so five years down the line GNOME still has a bottom that produces core GNOME software. If Sebastien is talking about directly pay, that isn't sustainable by current models. If someone thinks it is they should put together a plan. Every hackfest, intern and other recipients of funds does just this to justify the expense. Otherwise it is all just talk that isn't going to go anywhere.
--
J5