Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money
]] Steve McIntyre
> On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 12:29:04PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
>
> >This is a hugely important point: we're already seeing conflicts where
> >people conflate the paid-for LTS effort with other team's priorities.
> >If we move that funding closer to Debian, we're effectively saying that
> >«this funded effort is important and all relevant teams, volunteer or
> >not should support it», rather than trusting teams to act in the
> >currently more creative anarchic way. Adding more tension internally in
> >the project, which I think spending money in this way will do, is a bad
> >idea.
>
> That's definitely my concern, too. I don't want to have to consider
> funding when working on stuff for fun, and I also don't really want to
> reorganise how things are done to accommodate others who do.
At the same time as what's written above, I think we have to realise we
are in an incredibly privileged position to be able to contribute to
Debian because it's fun. I'd like that to be the case for more people,
and funding will be a part of that, as it is with Outreachy and to some
extent GSoC. However, what we're looking at here is not expanding our
outreach, it's almost the opposite: people have suggested improving core
services and improve underfunded, but important areas like bookeeping.
In addition, it's not clear that the funding and political work has to
come from Debian. I think it's a lot wider and hooks into the debate
about socioeconomic inequalities and universal basic income, areas which
I don't think we'll agree on at all inside of Debian.
> Having said both of these, I think there *are* reasonable places to
> spend money that shouldn't affect us so much. The areas in question
> are those where we struggle to find any/sufficient volunteer effort to
> do what we need - bureaucracy etc. Volunteer book-keepers are few and
> far between, IME.
We do have a treasurer team, I would be interested in hearing what their
feelings on this would be if we decided to bring in paid labour to help
them out.
--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
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