Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money
>>>>> "Ondřej" == Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org> writes:
Ondřej> It might be worth looking on how other organizations in
Ondřej> our ballpark are doing stuff. f.e. IETF/ISOC is in similar
Ondřej> situation to Debian/SPI.
I'm no longer really involved in the IETF, but I was involved in the
IETF for a number of years and was involved in a leadership role when
the previous structure was set up. (They are going through a transition
to replace the IASA with the IETF LLC right now, and I don't even
understand why they think that's a good idea; haven't even read the RFCs
involved)
ISOC was careful not to fund any standards work. So under that model
mapped to us, DPL, RT, all the decisions of ftpmaster, TC, NM, DAM, debian-legal, Debconf
content team, and all the
packaging effort would be unfunded.
There was an administrative director who worked on contracts, RFPs, and
who managed relationships. Then a lot of tasks were contracted. There
were some fairly long-term contracts for rfc-editor and for the
secretariat (who did debconf local/global team stuff, who ran the
non-RFC parts of the archive (id repository) (other than content
decisions), and helped with administration for bi-weekly document calls
etc).
Then there were contracts for things like tools development. So things
like DSA, dak development, development of release team scripts would be
contracted out for big projects. Smaller things and ongoing maintenance
would be handled by volunteers. Deciding what was wanted, writing
requirements specs, etc, etc would be done by volunteers.
With regard to Russ's concerns,
I think that making short-term grants to work on specific projects might
be much more achievable for us than salaries. It reduces the factors
he's worried about.
I think there would still be significant risk, but not nearly as much as
if we were actually paying salaries on an ongoing basis.
Factoring in past performance would be easier for new grants than trying
to fire someone.
But I think even given that the concerns would be very real.
That said, even in the IETF community there is very much an in croud for
the administrative stuff. The same people seem to often be getting the
contracts. If you actually cared about the business it seems like it
would be very easy to get feelings hurt.
Also, basically all the tasks the IETF pays for are very far from the
actual work of the IETF.
I actually think that Debian could possibly hire people to do our website on a
contract without it being a huge problem. We'd explicitly want the www
team (or hopefully no one in our community) not to bid. We'd want the
www team to be guiding the process and for the contract to be about
doing the things they don't want to or never get around to doing.
We'd want it to be something we'd be willing to do again in similar
circumstances, so that if it did actually change what people were
willing to work on that would be OK.
In that model, the www team would be more about deciding overall
structure, making the decisions than actually going and implementing
them.
But for a lot of what we do, it's close enough to our core that the mix
of money and power would be problematic.
As an example, even having people work on the dak software seems like it
would run into trouble as they could influence which features got
implemented etc.
When you start funding positions that actually have power to make
project-level decisions, I think you run into a lot of challenges.
--Sam
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