Re: Sponsorship for hackfests

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 11:44 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
>> Budget = trade-offs. More money for paying people = less money for
>> air-fares.
> 
> Why would for example the mobile vendors use upstream infrastructure if
> it's constantly slow or broken? In that case, they wont. Isn't this what
> we all want to avoid?

Like I said, this is all about trade-offs. In this case, hiring a
sysadmin will cost the foundation about as much as we spend on air
travel for people to GUADEC, and all the hackfests we run. We are not
talking about using the pencil & stamp budget.

Is our infrastructure constantly slow or broken? I am aware of
short-comings, especially with getting new things set up, but GNOME's
infrastructure has been pretty resilient, and any brokenness has been
fixed quickly, in my experience.

Is this worth (a) alienating our volunteer sysadmins by telling them
what a crappy job they've done, and (b) not spending any money on any
programmes at all?

If we don't do things worth fundraising for, sponsors will not continue
to give us money. The return on investment for Red Hat, Nokia, Novell
and others is having us get together. We have been successful in
fundraising for GUADEC because the value of it is obvious to all. Would
the same be true of a sysadmin?

> But if we need absolute agreement with every single individual involved
> in GNOME, we'll be a lame-duck just like the UN is. Caused by vetos of
> its permanent members. And that organization has just five of them. We'd
> have hundreds.

There's a pretty interesting logical jump :)

When did I say we needed agreement of everyone?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org