On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 12:02:59AM +0100, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote:
> a) What do you think are valid goals to spend this money on?
I believe the driving principle should be to use money as much as
possible to keep the project running at its best, while keeping an
emergency reserve (e.g. to be sure we can afford impromptu hardware
replacement needs).
Then, all the following are worth goals in which money can be put into
use:
- Sponsor DDs meetings.
This include helping out with DebConf travel sponsorships (when
sponsor money are not enough), as DPLs have done in the past.
DebConf should not be the only sponsored meeting though. For instance,
I acknowledge that a long week-end of work side-by-side can replace
several weeks of remote work. If elected DPL, I plan to spot strategic
areas where we might benefit from an intense hacking session, contact
the involved people to check they are interested and available in
meeting, and help out with money and/or specific sponsorship
campaigns. This is pretty much what the Extremadura region has been
offering to Debian, and I've always considered that as one of the best
way to contribute resources to us.
Note: we should not however sponsor _full_ trips just for the sake of
it, otherwise even the money we have now can run out quite quickly. We
should rather apply the "DebConf model" where, AFAIU it, you decide an
overall budget and then within its limits you balance how much
involved people are able to pay by themselves with how much they need
to be able to attend.
- Sponsor specific resources to enable DDs work at best.
For instance, DDs working on packages which take huge amount of time
to build might need specific buildds to speed up their work.
Similarly, DDs working on huge packages (this time in terms of .deb
size) might need access to machines with better network connections
for uploads or better connections tout court. I will encourage DDs
which feel blocked by resource needs to contact me about such needs.
- Booth / marketing stuff.
These are of course good places where to invest money, but I notice
that in the past we have been more lacking organization and manpower
than money. It is looking better these days, though.
FWIW, I don't believe the discussion raised by Steve on how to spend
Debian money last year "did not reach a conclusion". For instance, the
BoF at DebConf9 titled "money, money, money" has provided a lot of
suggestions, they just need to be put into use.
Last but not least, the project needs to be way more transparent on how
much money flows in and out. Ideally, we should have a public disclosure
of all money that comes in and that goes out (the latter at least easily
accessible to all DDs). That, I believe, would be way more fair both to
donors and to DDs, which vote for the DPL and should be able to review
his/her choices on Debian money, no matter they want to be SPI members
or not. Note that achieving that is not necessarily easy: it probably
involves more work on the shoulders of various treasurers and we should
be ready to help out with that, if it is a blocker.
> b) How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors?
Having a public balance of what comes in, in terms of money, would be a
good start.
For hardware contributions the best way is probably to advertise the
contributor on the web page of the hosted service, as we do for some
services, even though not uniformly. Ideally, we should have a web page
describing our technical infrastructure and who-has-sponsored-what in
such infrastructure.
> c) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What
> qualifies a "Debian Partner"?
In other big non-profit organizations I've been a member of, partnership
programs usually require an yearly subscription fee (possibly in
different classes: silver, gold, platinum, ...). In exchange of that the
partners get listed in a "partners" page and, in some cases, they also
get the right to voice their opinion in the choices of the
organization. We surely don't want the latter: as I've stated elsewhere
in Debian money shan't drive decisions (and we're open anyhow, anybody
can voice her opinion in our matters). We should have the former: a page
listing partners which are supporting us, and in fact we do have it.
How to organize that in term of donation thresholds and visibility is a
choice that we should better delegate to specific teams, such as -www,
-publicity, -press.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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