[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Egbert Eich]

Barton C Massey writes:
 > In message <17718.38743.844238.633379 at wlan-hermes.suse.de>
 > Egbert Eich wrote:
 > > Alex Deucher writes:
 > 
 > One important exception is funding of student projects.  I
 > think Google's Summer of Code program has shown us that we
 > can provide small funding to students on a competitive basis
 > without badly disrupting things.  I would be happy to help
 > in setting such a thing up, and would encourage the Board to
 > do so.

Yes, the 'Google summer of code' is a different model which 
doesn't seem to suffer from a lot of the problems I have 
outlined. 
The fundamental difference is there is no contract with somebody 
for doing a specific job instead a price is promised for someone 
who fullfills a certain task within a specific time. If the price 
will be awared is determined after the work has been delivered. 

Since people are rewarded for success the incentive to deliver
good work is strong. Also people know that they cannot negotiate 
follow up contracts to continue or complete the task and seek a 
long term employment thru this.

Still one must avoid to create jealousy as there are some tasks 
which are rewarded while others are not. Such a model requires 
good preparation as the goal needs to be realistic if not it 
would discourage people.

 > 
 > I've done some tiny amount of initial work on this, but got
 > sidetracked.  Having a qualified, funded student to get the
 > project off the ground with our assistance would be awesome.
 > 

Certainly, we need to agree on the goals and someone needs 
to pick it up and own it. Even if the work is delegated to 
someone else.

In the equation what to fund we must not forget that our
funds don't grow on trees. 
We receive our funding from corporate sponsors who put it 
in the hands of X.Org (ie its Board).
The sponsor companies trust us to make good use of these 
funds and of course are interested in how we make use of
them and what we achieved. 
If we are interested to see sponsoring to continue we need 
to better capture what motivates our sponsors to contribute
money to X.Org and spend the funds for worthwhile projects.
The way the funds have been spent this year does not qualify 
for this.
However it also needs to be made clear that finacial 
contributions are not the only way to support this 
project.
'Donated' manpower in terms of development is also very 
valuable. If we can get more comanies which benefit from
our work to hire some of our talented developers at least
part time it would help to boost our project.
This could be an alternative to getting X.Org envolved
in hiring people and would help where a summer of code
model does not apply.

Cheers,
	Egbert.