[IAEP] Funding - and governance

[Wade Brainerd]

Hey Jim,

That's a pretty interesting perspective, I admit I only have a small
amount of experience in the non-profit sector.

Were SugarLabs a for-profit company, it would be really
straightforward:  Hire good people using the money from selling (or
supporting) software.  They work to improve and evangelize the
software, which sells more software.  Beyond that, it's all a matter
of company management setting the strategic direction.

When the funding comes from all kinds of different stakeholders, this
certainly becomes complicated.  And when you depend on a community who
have their own competing wishes for the strategic direction of the
project, it gets extremely complicated.

Any project development effort must learn to manage risk.  Lack of
control over core talent is a big risk, but so is strategic dilution
by external funders.  OLPC can mitigate this somewhat since they have
a revenue stream tied to sales of laptops.  Other organizations like
Canonical and Mozilla have revenue streams tied to "sales" of their
product too.

Can Sugar Labs realize this somehow, to allow it to stay independent
yet maintain a full time core team?  Or is it really just going to
consist of an army of high-overhead volunteers?  Is that even
possible, given that the volunteers are not generally going to be the
target users (e.g. the usual "itch scratching" motivation of OSS
development is removed)?  What is the turnover rate going to be like,
and how is a cohesive development strategy going to be maintained?

My favorite open source projects are like Trac - a high caliber, full
time team develops the core modules & sets the direction, earning
revenue through paid support contracts & custom development, while the
community fleshes out the software ecosystem.  This is the kind of
model I would love to see Sugar Labs take on.  Basically, develop and
release Sugar in partnership with the community, and sell deployment
and customization services to pay for the core developers.  The core
developers do deployment work regularly, meaning they have direct
contact with clients (i.e. real educators), and the project can afford
to stay independent of outside interests.  The community has to trust
the core team's vision, but now that Sugar Labs is independent of OLPC
and Walter is in charge (right?) I doubt that will be an issue.

Best,
Wade