Re: Sponsorship for hackfests

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2009/3/31 Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>:
> On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 09:37 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
>> Hi Philip,
>>
>> I agree with you that when the foundation has spent money on
>> initiatives, the people who have benefitted have not always done
>> everything they might have to publicise the support and ensure that
>> people could see a clear value to the spending. The difficulty that
>> Lucas has had getting articles & reports about events for the annual
>> report testifies to this, as does the long lay-off in GNOME Journal
>> editions.
>
>> I believe that the foundation board at least does request things like
>> this - they've asked people to blog about events where they're funded to
>> attend, and (as you say) I've seen proposals that attendees do
>> interviews during co-ordinated events like the hackfest.
>
> Push for it, in a much more formal way. Don't just request them. It's
> the foundation's money: you can request things like this. We voted for
> you people so that you can.

Sorry, but being on a foreign country, for hacking purposes and still
doing some blogging is hard enough. You can ask, but you can't enforce
people to do it. You're forgetting the nature of the project, some
people is willing to do some work, like write code, and the foundation
helps, forcing people to blog or write articles is going to do nothing
but hold people back from gathering together and write code, and if it
doesn't they can just not blog and say they didn't have time (and they
will be probably right about this).

I understand your concern, but I encourage you to organize a hackfest,
and try to push everyone to blog about it, and still, people in the
outside would feel that the activities haven't been publitized enough.
I'm talking with my experience on organizing the theming api hackfest
here.

> And if people don't like how you guys handle things like this, they
> should just vote different next year.
>
> You are already planning to start paying a sysadmin. In a similar way
> I'm guessing you can pay a journalist writing the articles and editing
> the interviews. I must say I have few experience with what is involved
> in this, so I can't comment myself on how this should be planned and
> executed exactly. I'm sure we have people who do in our group.
>
>> But we don't have a whip, and we don't have a full-time editor to go
>> around and constantly remind people of the things they promised they'd
>> do. In a volunteer organisation, the members need to take personal
>> responsibility for things like this, more often than not.
>
> Sure you have a whip: flight tickets.
>
> Don't pay them unless you have your interviews. You can even make a
> contract that says that. I also don't see what would be wrong with
> making clear agreements with participants. Especially not if every
> participant knows why the agreement is made. If the context of the
> agreement is reasonable, most of them will (I think) agree.
>
> I must note that when I participated myself I did note a sense of
> responsibility among the developers participating. Nobody was trying to
> be on a free holiday, everybody worked hard. But in their passion and
> being busy they wont all remember that they should also help with the
> interviews and writing blogs unless you make this as a requirement for
> the foundation's help.
>
> Clarity is I think the keyword.
>
>
> --
> Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
> home: me at pvanhoof dot be
> gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
> http://pvanhoof.be/blog
> http://codeminded.be
>
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-- 
Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz