Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 13:58 +0200, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 09:51:15AM +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:
> > The approach to budgeting is similar in that the Foundation and Google
> > both have a budget, but our budgets are quite different. Any spending
> > in any area means that that money cannot be spent in another area.
>
> What if the Foundation decides to just organize OPW, which is already a
> good contribution, but doesn't sponsor itself interns? By doing that,
> the saving permits to spend the $10k or $5k on something else, like
> sponsoring an experienced member of the Foundation instead of sponsoring
> newcomers.
>
> For example when a Friends of Gnome campaign (like for the accessibility
> or security) is finished, the Gnome Foundation could add $5k to it.

What exactly do you hope to achieve by saving $5k?

One of the problems for the Friends Of GNOME campaigns is that we have
trouble finding interested parties to work so cheaply to implement the
goals we set out. When I was on the board, I put together 2 call of bids
for those campaigns, and I constantly heard from consultancies that the
amount was so low that the only reason that they would be interested in
it was to help GNOME. I doubt that the amount is significant enough to
pay the people necessary to achieve the goals we set out.

GSoC mentoring and OPW are much better value for money. They introduce
people to Free Software development, to a community. Some of the alumni
stay in the community, like yourself, some go into other branches of
Free Software, or activism related to technology.

Even if we said that those $5k were incredibly important, what would you
do with them? We haven't had cases where hackfests were cancelled due to
lack of funding and adding $5k to a FoG campaign kind of misses the
point (we pay for our own campaign?) to add to an amount that's not
enough to achieve the goals we set out when consultancies are paid
market rate.

It's all a false economy.