[IAEP] Funding

[Walter Bender]

Good question to which there is not a definitive answer yet. The model
I have been kicking around in my head is to have a small team that
keeps its focus on top the various infrastructure needs of the
community and raises money to support community gatherings and such
incidentals as the filing of trademarks (expensive), etc.

We've also been discussing other needs and models for supporting Sugar
development and Sugar deployments. To what extent should we strive
towards having an in-house team dedicated to such efforts? I lean
towards a minimal footprint in keeping with the spirit of maintaining
a diverse and distributed project, but it has been pointed out that
model is asking perhaps too much at times. Plus it is a very young
effort and will need some nurturing to reach a level of stability.

We will need so some commitment of engineering resources from industry
and other parties interested in Sugar as well as some commitment to
Sugar Labs itself.

These commitments would scale depending upon how much work is required
(for a port or some necessary customization). At a minimum we'll need
the commitment of liaisons from industry and deployments and enough of
a community with whom they can reliably interact.

The types of things that need to be worked on (by someone) include
support for different distributions (and operating systems?), hardware
platforms, localization, maintenance of existing activities, support
for new activities, QA, documentation, evaluation, storytelling, etc.
Some of these things require bootstrapping; some may require dedicated
resources.

If we leave things entirely up to hardware vendors and their partners,
this would require an unrealistic commitment of engineering resources
on their side (at least initially) and there is little evidence of
their commitment to resources beyond engineering; OLPC has made such a
commitment in the past, but it is not yet clear they will continue or
that others would (could) follow their example.

Should we choose to support just a single distribution, we are going
to run into distribution wars both on the community and on the
deployment side, so we really need to be at a cross-distribution
level, which is where we are heading, but this is a lot to ask of an
all volunteer community.

I can imagine there would be a need for Sugar consultants--both
technical and pedagogical--but it is not clear that Sugar Labs needs
to be more than a clearinghouse for such services.

Your thoughts?

-walter

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 1:48 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a plan yet for funding SugarLabs and having paid staff?
>
> --
> Edward Cherlin
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