On 2021/03/18 21:44, Philip Hands wrote: > I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's > money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD > which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian > funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit > restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply > your own criteria of course). > > That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since > people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that > have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding > would almost certainly sort out once and for all. > > You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs) > just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask > people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money > on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't > get too silly. > > Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be > the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how > well it went before they would get any new budget allocated. People > that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful > could then be given larger budgets to play with in future. > > Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would > hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.
I think as things stand now, every DD pretty much already has the entire Debian budget available at their disposal if they can think of a way to spend it that benefits the project. Something like the budget-per-DD idea might be good to encourage people to actually use Debian money if they can, this is also why I brought an expenditure policy into my platform, because I think people will feel more comfortable spending Debian money if it's really explicit that it really is ok to do so. -Jonathan