Re: [gentoo-project] Fundraising for incremental service level

[Andrey Utkin]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 07:04:39AM +0200, Michał Górny wrote:
> 2. Are developers hired to work full-time on Gentoo going to qualify for
> the extra money too?

It doesn't matter what's employment status of any particular developers.

Nobody is automatically eligible for any extra money.

First such funds become available to the lead of the funding campaign. Their
reputation is on the line and they are responsible for the overall result. It
is up to them how they redistribute it with collaborators (they should have a
plan upfront, in fact). Again, rewards for collaborators are not a gratitude
for being there in Gentoo, but for the extra work to achieve previously
unachievable goal.


> 3. Ideas like this tend to get rejected because people are concerned
> about some people arbitrarily deciding who gets the money, and who
> doesn't, and other people disagreeing with their decisions.  Just think
> of the one developer who used to do a lot of work, and then people had
> to spend twice as much time fixing it.

I think there's no party in this scheme who makes arbitrary decisions.

Users give their own money.
Project lead shares the money they've been given to ensure the project success.

Wrong money allocation is punished by nature at each of these points, so we
don't need a supervisor for anyone.

> > I think if we find such possibilities - the levels of service quality which
> > we're not going to meet given the status quo, but which we're going to meet
> > fairly confidently given funding - some of these would be interesting enough to
> > wide users community to fund them.
>
> I'm sorry but I have no clue what this means.  Could you translate it
> from marketing to English?

It's not marketingish. But I do work in customer service in a software company,
close to "customer success" projects, which is why some the things I'm talking
about may seem foreign.

There I was suggesting to search for specific activities which we are doing,
and look for activities which have special interesting properties.

An example:
We have security-related updates.
Let's assume we even identify them all.
Minimising delays when distributing the patches is important.
Let's measure a delay covering 90% of the cases in a given month or year. Say, X days.
Assume this measure has some stable range in recent historical data.

Now, let's try to find a delay value Y (days) which
* is tangibly more useful at least a fraction of the userbase;
* is achievable given some extra effort which it is realistically possible to
  fund by the interested users;
* is not realistically achievable given current and historical level of
  dedicated effort.

If there is such Y, then we could discuss funding this with the users.
If not, there is clearly no such opportunity.

> We could start with thousands of bugs that get ignored.

Sure, why not!

If (given a bit more specific definition of that set of bugs)

* that's what users decide to fund, and
* it won't possibly get done without,

then it fits into this proposal.

> > Do you believe the goals of your project really matter for quality of life of
> > real users so that they'd give non-zero amount of money for this criteria to be
> > consistently met (as opposed to current inferior quality)?
> >
> > If yes, why not try fundraising to ensure that such a higher quality bar is
> > met, say, throughout the next year?
>
> Could you elaborate a bit on what kind of fundraising do you mean?  Are
> you talking of asking for donations earmarked for a specific project,
> and distributed by Foundation afterwards?  Or dedicated to specific
> developers?

My understanding is that Gentoo Foundation is a non-profit org and is not meant
to distribute income to its members (doing that is a legal risk), which makes
it useless in this situation.

The funding should go directly to people taking the extra responsibility and
doing extra work. I imagine funding should go directly to a lead person if
possible, or through a legal entity in their control.