Re: Usage of Debian's Money
On 13/03/13 at 00:57 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 12 Mar 2013, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > 3) For what kind of things?
> >
> > Since you are asking the question, isn't it up to you to come up with
> > ideas/examples? :) I find it difficult to discuss such things in the
> > general case.
>
> On Tue, 12 Mar 2013, Moray Allan wrote:
> > In fact I fear that it's logically impossible for me to give
> > examples to demonstrate my point. My claim is that I would be open
> > to new ideas from others about spending money, and actively look for
> > suggestions. Anything that I suggest myself here is by definition
> > not a new idea from others!
>
> Since both of you want examples of possible uses of money, here you have
> some that I quickly came up with:
>
> 1/ Grant some amount of money to the release team to offer as bounties on
> release blocker issues that are not going forward.
I think that it is important to motivate our contributors using things
that we can reasonably provide on the long term. Such as the reward of
participating to a well-known and visible project.
I don't support the idea of using monetary bounties to encourage volunteers.
I could be convinced to use Debian money to encourage volunteers if the
focus was not on money itself, but rather on giving an quite inexpensive gift.
For example, if the idea was to give cool tshirts with a "10 RC bugs fixed:
my contribution to releasing Debian" message.
> 2/ Have the ftpmasters write up a spec of what needs to be done to finally
> have "ddeb support" (or "PPA" or ...) and use Debian's money to contract
> with someone (unaffiliated to Debian?) to actually implement the spec under the
> supervision of ftpmasters. Copyright of the code written would fall under
> Debian/SPI.
Same as above, I would not support that.
Maintaining packages and our distribution infrastructure is really
central in Debian. I don't think that we should outsource that.
I could be convinced if the task was not something related to usual
skills found inside Debian, and that, even after trying we could not
find any volunteer able/willing to do the task.
> 3/ Buy advertising space on various media to recruit new contributors and
> lead them into our (improved) mentoring infrastructure.
I think that we have other, better ways, to improve the project's
visibility than to use paid advertising. For example, do cool stuff, and
get it covered by the press. ;)
> Offer goodies as
> rewards to new contributors who successfully played some game which
> tricked them into contributing to Debian.
That goodie example is similar to my t-shirt example above. So yes, why
not.
Lucas
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