[IAEP] Funding - and governance

[Jim Gettys]

Wade,

I've seen projects *die* from having centrally funded development staff
conflated with project management and governance.  This was the X
consortium model (though it made other mistakes too).  The scars are on
my back, and I'm personally partially responsible for that mistake. And
also as a result of that mistake, I've had a hobby of observing (and
participating in) governance of large free software projects over the
last 8-10 years (e.g. Gnome, X.org).

Several things can happen when governance and development are conflated:
  o companies/organizations think to themselves: "I paid good money to
the consortium", and tell them to do it rather than staffing up to get
things done themselves.  Net result: no community, and endless arguments
over what work the central staff should do; often over pet projects the
funding organization can't afford anyway, looking at that pot of money
as a way to get what they think they want.
  o companies/organizations think to themselves: "Other people are paid
to do it, I won't help", (either by people or money).
  o it becomes against the economic interest of the funding
companies/organizations for the software to continue to evolve.  So they
oppose change.
  o the funding organizations, having put good money in to fund people,
now believe they have good reason to "vote" and control what happens.
This fundamentally dis-empowers the community.  And then, you get to
start over building community and an organization from scratch. While
successful forks are possible, boy, are they hard (again, first hand
experience).
  o "us" v.s. "them".  We see lots of that right now with OLPC; as our
efforts have had to shift toward issues arising out of deployment, it
has had the effect of dividing the community who develop the code and
those who have to deal with the day-in-day out support issues.  Lots of
frustration on both sides.  But more pernicious is control vested in a
single organization of funded people; their ideas become much more
likely to "ship" than other contributors, dis empowering both individual
volunteers and organizations. Great people drift off into other
projects, and you die slowly.  Did you know Guido Van Rossem was once an
X hacker?

In general, I'm much more comfortable with resources in the organization
responsible for Sugar going toward community building.  If you look at
Gnome, or new X.org, most of the (relatively nominal) money they get
from sponsors toward meetings and conferences, toward enabling travel of
volunteers to those meetings, hardware for central facilities such as
servers.  They also act as dispute resolution forums, (though in well
run projects, those are pretty rare events).  The bulk of the work is
done on by people with direct stakes in their outcomes, whether
commercial or volunteer, and all are peers.

Having said this: sometimes it has made sense for open source
organizations to fund work no one wants to do (e.g. test suites, or
hiring copy editors to improve documentation, or...), though Cairo has
shown even (some or all) those can be done by well disciplined projects.

So I'm very happy if Walter can get money to help push Sugar forward:
but I think it is a grave mistake if we have governance of Sugar in
*either* Sugarlabs (*if* it becomes a development organization by hiring
developers) or OLPC's hands.  Sugar as a free software project has to
become its own thing as an independently governed entity.  And this will
solve many conflict of interest and trust issues inhibiting growth of
the community, and allow us all to work together even if funding sources
are from highly competitive sources.  You put the two together
(governance and major funding), and it spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e.
                             Best Regards,
                                     - Jim Gettys




On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 17:43 -0700, Wade Brainerd wrote:
> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 3:25 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I believe this is one way in which non-profits often falter, compared
> with their for-profit competitors.  I have worked with non-profits who
> have high caliber "idea" people and a regular supply of volunteer
> labor, but no core technical staff.  When each volunteer engineer
> burns out and leaves, their work is discarded and begun anew by the
> next volunteer, because nobody is there to carry it forward, or
> explain it to the next person.
> 
> The same issue applies to companies who employ a lot of contractors.
> 
> You need at least one senior representative of each discipline
> required by the project, full time and on staff.  For Sugar, I think
> this includes project management, user interface design, artwork,
> shell interface programming, system programming, packaging (and
> release management), documentation, infrastructure, and activity
> development.
> 
> Also, I think that activity development must be a core part of the
> team.  Someone needs to be responsible to develop the "killer apps"
> that sell the platform (where would the Wii be without Wii Sports?),
> and someone needs to be able to take over important projects when
> volunteers leave.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Wade
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-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child