About funding and all that

[shiftee]

The lack of a structure for project funding as a whole could lead to missed opportunities.
For example KDE received a $300k donation recently, it's not unthinkable for the same thing to happen here.

I believe it was mentioned that we could approach The Document Foundation or similar and ask them to manage it for us.
What do people think of this idea?

[kkremitzki]

The lack of a structure for project funding as a whole could lead to missed opportunities.
For example KDE received a $300k donation recently, it's not unthinkable for the same thing to happen here.

I believe it was mentioned that we could approach The Document Foundation or similar and ask them to manage it for us.
What do people think of this idea?

I think you're right on the missed opportunities part. And we've had some discussion on different orgs that provide this sort of thing before, I think a rough consensus on who would be best to turn to is the Software Freedom Conservancy: https://sfconservancy.org/

We'd be in good company: https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/

[shiftee]

I propose that we apply to SFC (it's a simple email) and see where it goes.

Kurt, I think you should send the email.

Werner, Yorik and Bernd are the top 3 committers on github, would any of you mind being designated as the project leaders to manage any prospective funding?

Any future collaboration with BRL-CAD could be done on a technical basis.

Relevant info:
https://sfconservancy.org/about
https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply
https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services

Any objections or alterations to the above?

[kkremitzki]

I propose that we apply to SFC (it's a simple email) and see where it goes.

Kurt, I think you should send the email.

Werner, Yorik and Bernd are the top 3 committers on github, would any of you mind being designated as the project leaders to manage any prospective funding?

Any future collaboration with BRL-CAD could be done on a technical basis.

Relevant info:
https://sfconservancy.org/about
https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply
https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services

Any objections or alterations to the above?

I'm all for it. I had reached out to Karen Sandler of the SFC on Twitter before, and one point she made is that even if we get in touch with them we don't have to actually proceed with anything, but we can get an idea of what things would look like if we were to proceed with joining.

[antoniovazquezblanco]

I propose that we apply to SFC (it's a simple email) and see where it goes.

Kurt, I think you should send the email.

Werner, Yorik and Bernd are the top 3 committers on github, would any of you mind being designated as the project leaders to manage any prospective funding?

Any future collaboration with BRL-CAD could be done on a technical basis.

Relevant info:
https://sfconservancy.org/about
https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply
https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services

Any objections or alterations to the above?

I'm all for it. I had reached out to Karen Sandler of the SFC on Twitter before, and one point she made is that even if we get in touch with them we don't have to actually proceed with anything, but we can get an idea of what things would look like if we were to proceed with joining.

I think this is very nice. This can be a way to improve your chances to access to extra funding and to manage resources better.

[Kunda1]

[sgrogan]

I think you're right on the missed opportunities part. And we've had some discussion on different orgs that provide this sort of thing before, I think a rough consensus on who would be best to turn to is the Software Freedom Conservancy: https://sfconservancy.org/

We'd be in good company: https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/

I'm all for the dev's being compensated for their work, but I struggle to see how this works with FreeCAD.
What if a newly formed FreeCAD non-profit received $300k? What would FreeCAD do?

[kkremitzki]

I think you're right on the missed opportunities part. And we've had some discussion on different orgs that provide this sort of thing before, I think a rough consensus on who would be best to turn to is the Software Freedom Conservancy: https://sfconservancy.org/

We'd be in good company: https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/

I'm all for the dev's being compensated for their work, but I struggle to see how this works with FreeCAD.
What if a newly formed FreeCAD non-profit received $300k? What would FreeCAD do?

It would operate similarly to other projects in this scenario. So, the money would be handled very transparently with a priority for small, precise expenditures. Most common is paying for developers to go to conferences where they can present on FreeCAD, proselytize for it, and get high-bandwidth in-person work done with each other, since that has quite high bang-for-buck.

For actual coding work, it can be done similarly to how Debian LTS is handled. Features are chunked out with time estimates, the work is either assigned or volunteered for from the people who can implement it, and they are paid after publishing reports of the work.

[freedman]

Most common is paying for developers to go to conferences where they can present on FreeCAD

I don't think that would be my choice for funding.

How about with 300K, people get to vote (in some way) where the money goes. Each vote is worth 5 bucks. Some people get mutiple vote powers, could be linked to the number of forum posts. Every 100 posts gives you 1 vote. So kkremitzki with 968 posts would have 9 votes to assign per month. Give the power to vote to 50 active users and they need to be active. Full disclosure of what goes where each month, users would vote on projects to do. Maybe just do it as a trial for a few months to see how it would work.

Just a spit ball.

[kkremitzki]

Most common is paying for developers to go to conferences where they can present on FreeCAD

I don't think that would be my choice for funding.

I should clarify that I'm not talking about plane trips & hotel stays but for example registration for events and regional travel. A good comparison would be Debian which has an offer to reimburse €100/$125 for travel to bug squashing parties for Debian developers: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project ... 00050.html

So if, say, someone travels to a local Linux conf and gives presentations sharing FreeCAD, I think that's fine to reimburse if we could.