Re: [gentoo-project] Looking for ways the Foundation can accomplish its mission.

[Richard Yao]

> On Sep 6, 2018, at 8:32 PM, Richard Yao <ryao@g.o> wrote:
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>> On Sep 6, 2018, at 9:07 AM, Raymond Jennings <shentino@×××××.com> wrote:
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>> Honestly, I would like to see the foundation trustees maintain a
>> higher level of communication with the rest of the project, especially
>> comrel, council, infra, recruiting, etc.
>>
>> One thing that distresses me to no end is the profound lack of respect
>> given to the foundation and its mission, to the point where I've seen
>> people try to bypass the foundation entirely on financial matters, as
>> well as show open disregard for the foundation's mission, and talk has
>> been had of having the foundation itself disbanded.
>>
>> I want the foundation to have more involvement in gentoo, beyond just
>> the paperwork.
>>> On Thu, Sep 6, 2018 at 5:47 AM Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Gentoo Community,
>>>
>>> I have recently become the President of the Gentoo Foundation Inc. The Foundation's documents[0] provide fairly terse guidance on how the Foundation is to be operated. The Foundation currently provides funding for Gentoo Infrastructure, and very little else. Part of my job as President is to determine what additional activities the Foundation can pursue (if any); and to determine how the Foundation can improve Gentoo by investing in infrastructure, while still meeting the spirit of the other restrictions on Foundation activities[1]. So community, how do you think the Foundation can assist the development of Gentoo?
>>>
>>> Some ideas might be:
>>> - Host a Gentoo Conference.
> Yes, please. Debian and Fedora both have these. We really ought to have one too.
To be clear, I am not suggesting this as a “me-too” thing. I am interested in it because I think it would be nice to have a meet and greet. We have never had one. It need not be annual. Maybe every 5 years would be a good compromise between seeing each other and not spending too much. The mini-conf others mentioned could also work for this. However, I recall that not many of us go, which makes it difficult to justify making the trip to Europe.
>>> - Host a bug-bounty program.
> This would need to be restricted to critical bugs. Otherwise, it would drain the foundation treasury very quickly. We also would need to restrict this to non-developers, again to avoid draining the treasury.
>>> - Fund talks about Gentoo development activities at industry conferences.
> This is good. I like it. The Yocto project has been winning mindshare from us because we simply don’t show up at conferences. Showing up at conferences would go a long way toward addressing this.
>>> - Invest significantly in Infrastructure spending to fund ambitious projects.
> Like RISC-V support? The problem here is that we need volunteers. We already have the ability to file funding requests, but ENOTIME keeps people from working on such things. I think the previous idea would help here in terms of growing the community so that we have volunteers to work on these things.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> -Alec
>>> President, Gentoo Foundation Inc.
>>>
>>> [0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Main_Page#Tasks_of_the_Gentoo_Foundation
>>> [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Main_Page#Gentoo_is_independent
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