Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
On 2021/03/18 21:44, Philip Hands wrote:
> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
> your own criteria of course).
>
> That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
> people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
> have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
> would almost certainly sort out once and for all.
>
> You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs)
> just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask
> people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money
> on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't
> get too silly.
>
> Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be
> the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how
> well it went before they would get any new budget allocated. People
> that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful
> could then be given larger budgets to play with in future.
>
> Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
> hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.
I think as things stand now, every DD pretty much already has the entire
Debian budget available at their disposal if they can think of a way to
spend it that benefits the project.
Something like the budget-per-DD idea might be good to encourage people
to actually use Debian money if they can, this is also why I brought an
expenditure policy into my platform, because I think people will feel
more comfortable spending Debian money if it's really explicit that it
really is ok to do so.
-Jonathan
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