[IAEP] Funding - and governance

Wed May 28 10:42:35 CEST 2008

I've been trying to wrap my brain around this idea for content-based
projects.  I've had a few people that I respect take the same stance
as Jim.  Mako wrote a pretty good article on the subject a few years
ago that I think has some bearing on the situation:

http://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 1:27 AM, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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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>> Its.an.education.project at lists.sugarlabs.org
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> --
> Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
> One Laptop Per Child
>
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