Re: Membership dues [ was: Re: Advisory Board Letter ]

[Frank Hecker <frank collab net>]

[Trimming the cc list, because I'm assuming all the named recipients are
also on the foundation mailing list.]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Bart Decrem <bart@eazel.com> writes:
> > Now, if there's consensus that having a $100,000 budget and/or
> > having one paid staff person, is a Bad Idea, then obviously we
> > should change the proposed membership structure.
> 
> Hmm, I was originally indifferent on this issue but I do have some
> concerns after talking/thinking about it. The problem is that things
> can get out of control -

Living in the DC area and knowing people who work at nonprofit
charitable and political oranizations and industry trade associations,
I'm quite familar with the problems that can occur when you have a
well-funded central staff looking for things to do. Your concerns
definitely can't be dismissed out of hand.

To me the key questions are: what are the ongoing functions which need
to be performed in order to make GNOME successful, and which of those
functions might be best funded and (possibly) staffed through the
foundation (as opposed to being done by independent volunteers or
employees of corporations involved with GNOME)?

Handling things through the foundation might be done because a)
something needs to be done, but for whatever reason it's not getting
done by volunteers or corporations; or b) something needs to be done and
for political reasons (e.g., fear of one company dominating) it's better
to do it through the foundation.

Here are my thoughts on that based on experience with mozilla.org,
which while not an independent organization from a legal point of view
is still IMO a good example of a funded central staff for an open source
project. mozilla.org right now has on the order of 5-10 full-time
people, almost all of them Netscape employees. Some of the functions
performed are as follows, together with my comments:

* Development. Several mozilla.org staff members are also Mozilla
developers, but IMO this is not necessarily core to mozilla.org's
function. I think that development is the one function which absolutely
doesn't need to be done by a central foundation staff. GNOME development
has been done by volunteers traditionally, and is now also being done by
corporate employees who are paid to do hack on GNOME full-time.

If there are development tasks that are seen as worthy _and_ that aren't
getting done in any other way, then the foundation can serve simply as a
conduit for money to get development done on a contract basis (e.g., by
paying independent developers who would otherwise be volunteers). Of
course someone still has to make decisions on what to fund and how to
evaluate and select contractors, but there are a number of ways to do
that in a relatively objective and neutral way, e.g., by having a
funding panel appointed by the board.

* Project administration. Maintenance of the core project "assets",
including the CVS repository, bug database, project web site, mailing
lists and newsgroups, IRC servers, and so on; this includes basic
sysadmin stuff plus other added-value activities, e.g., collecting and
analyzing project metrics.  (Depending on how you count them,
mozilla.org has 2-3 people handling this sort of thing.) As with
development, much of this stuff could be handled by a combination of
volunteers (e.g., for creating web site content) and corporate donation
of people and systems. Alternatively a lot of it could be contracted out
to a third party, similar to the way foundation-funded development could
be done, with funding through the foundation and contractor selection by
a board-appointed panel.

* Press/analyst relations. Speaking to the press and industry analysts
who want interviews, official statements, etc. This is not too demanding
in terms of the time required, and could be done by someone like a board
member. I wouldn't have a foundation staff person for this purpose
alone, but if you're going to have a foundation staff person at all then
it makes sense for them to take on some, perhaps most, of these
activities, as well as related activities like representing the GNOME
project at conferences, etc.

* Corporate support. This is something mozilla.org has seen a great
demand for (and hasn't been fully able to meet the demand). We've seen a
number of corporations come to the Mozilla project wanting to
participate in the project and use Mozilla in their own products, and
asking for some sort of help; requests include training in the technical
internals and external APIs of Mozilla, advice on how to best
participate in the project, information on Mozilla licensing and other
business issues, and so on. (Yes, they could read the FAQs, but there
are lots of corporations who want a real person who can give them the
information in a neat little package -- with the ability to ask
questions on the spot -- as opposed to them going out and searching for
information and asking questions in public project forums.)

The level of time required for this sort of thing goes well beyond what
a volunteer could handle, or what a person with an existing
GNOME-related job could handle on a spare-time or part-time basis; in
many cases companies ask for people who can fly out for a day or two on
short notice and do a complete data dump on the project. Also,
corporations typically want someone who can "speak for the project", as
well as someone who is perceived as relatively independent and is not
associated with a competitor or potential competitor.

So I think this type of thing may be worth considering full-time staff
for, whether they're employed directly by the foundation or are hired as
independent contractors.  One issue here is that typically you need two
types of skills for this function, and hence typically two types of
people: someone who can speak authoritatively on business issues and
someone who can speak authoritatively on technical issues.

Note also that whatever staff handle corporate support can then also
handle duties like staffing trade show booths and the like; I consider
this a special case of corporate support in so far as its purpose is to
promote GNOME to corporations.

> Unless we get order-of-magnitude increases in funding and make the
> foundation into its own development house, hiring permanent
> developers, etc., I don't see how more money is going to get us
> anywhere... and hiring developers sounds like a Bad Idea to me. The
> biggest donors would be able to strongly influence GNOME development
> directions, among other disadvantages.

Whatever else the foundation does, I don't think it should have in-house
developers, as I discussed above. My guess is that if people think the
foundation should have full-time staff, then the number of people would
be at most two, one to handle business issues and one to handle
technical issues; the technical person could and should also be a GNOME
developer, but from the foundation point of view they are doing
development not just to add useful code but also in order to get the
technical expertise and credibility they'd need in order to provide
authoritative and complete support to corporations and other
organizations getting involved with GNOME in some way.

Frank
-- 
Frank Hecker            work: http://www.collab.net/
frank@collab.net        home: http://www.hecker.org/